This update adds new cooking and fishing systems, as well as many combat, gameplay, and QoL improvements!
We're so excited to see the fish you catch and the dishes you cook with them!
We've also heard a lot of your feedback and brought back a lot of the Legacy Saleblazers feel!
Cooking is now in Saleblazers!!!
Play the all-new Chef class, prep food for adventures, and force-feed your friends (or foes)!
There are a variety of ingredients like Corn, Mushrooms, Apples, and more all throughout The Island that all possess unique attributes when cooked.
When using a Campfire or Stove, you'll have to add some fuel to get started.
Then, pick a vessel like one of those Bamboo Bowls Pop Pop taught you to make!
Higher quality bowls will increase the duration of your recipe.
If you don't pick anything, you'll end up making a skewer.
Then, pick some ingredients! Each ingredient has unique effects.
Finally, drag your food into the flames to start cooking. Be careful not to drop ingredients out of the bowl! Everything is physics-based, so there's a risk of food falling onto the ground!
Use your eyes and ears to determine when to take your food out of the fire. If you perfectly cook a dish, it'll offer even greater bonuses!
Try not to overcook your food! Uh oh!!!
However, some signature recipes rely on you undercooking or overcooking the food on purpose...
Some say there's even an overcooked recipe that can make you (or your enemies) deaf!
If you prefer a hands-off approach to cooking, simply unlock the Oven via the Research Board and enjoy its slower but more reliable cooking process.
Place food ingredients in the oven.
Wait for it to cook.
A sound will play to let you know when your food's ready!
There's a large variety of food that'll give you tons of health, catch you on fire, turn you into an ice cube, poison you, or even make you better at fishing.
You can even make soup! Just equip a bowl and hold E with some water to get a bowl of water, then start adding ingredients as usual.
Mix and match ingredients to discover unique signature recipes with powerful effects!
Alongside the countless dynamic meals you can make, you can discover recipes for over 100 signature meals across many cuisines!
There's an all new cooking skill that will offer even more cooking bonuses!
You'll be able to unlock the ability to add even more ingredients when cooking for even more types of food!
Remember, you can view your skills in the ESC menu.
As a reminder, you can force-feed other people by throwing food at them with G.
Some food effects give useful bonuses you can throw to your friends in combat, and some might be a potent weapon against your enemies!
You can now right-click an item in your inventory to perform actions on it!
Here, you can wear some boots in your inventory.
You'll also be able to eat food straight out of your inventory!
We've added a lot of cool new features here, like being able to set certain foods as bait, mark items as important so they won't be used for crafting or sold by employees, and marking an inventory slot as "Manual" so items you pick up won't go in that slot.
Fishing is now fully fleshed out and even more fun!
With the new Fisherman class, find the biggest and rarest fish on The Island to put in your aquarium, cook, sell, or even use as a weapon!
You'll be able to catch a ton of new types of fish in the various waters of The Island!
You'll be able to find fish depending on what game zone you're in, how the weather is like, and what time it is.
You'll be able to use any food as bait!
You can right-click on bait while holding a rod to set it as bait. Higher-quality bait will have an easier time attracting fish.
When you first drop your physics-based bobber in the water, you'll catch a glimpse of what's nearby.
You can move your bobber with WASD to position yourself for the fish you want, but be careful not to scare all the fish away.
In this all new fishing minigame, you'll be trying to drag the fish towards you to tire it out by holding S periodically. Be careful not to break your fishing line!
If successful, you'll be able to see what kind of fish you caught!
Longer and rarer fish offer greater bonuses.
You'll occasionally see bubbles in the water. Try casting your fishing rod in them to see what you can find!
The better your fishing rod is, the longer and stronger your line will be. This update adds new tiers of fishing rod items to research and craft!
All of the new types of fish will have unique attributes and be compatible with the new cooking system!
Fish offer incredible combat bonuses depending on their type, rarity, length, and your fishing skill!
For those of you who don't want to hurt fish, you can also place them in some all new aquarium items found in the research tree!
You can now see fish swimming around in the water before you even start fishing! They'll also react to you moving towards them and shooting them.
We've updated the fishing skill to be just as fun as the new cooking skill, with bonuses every few levels.
You'll be able to unlock new fishing abilities such as being able to scare away fish you've already caught!
Instead of taking damage when you're starving or dehydrated, you now gain extra max HP if you are sufficiently nourished.
(If you have the survival option enabled in the game settings, you'll still take damage and die like before.)
You'll see icons of the last eaten and drank items underneath your health bar at the top left. You can hover over them to see what effects your food is giving you.
When you eat some food and when your hunger bar is full, your health will passively regenerate.
Spells will now home in on the closest target they can find.
Hold down the attack button to charge up your spell, making it bigger and stronger the longer you charge it!
If you level up your intelligence enough, you'll be able to power it up for an extremely long time!
This should add a lot more strategy and gameplay variety to all the Mage players out there.
We've added some new classes for you to enjoy the game in many new ways!
Fisherman - Start out the game and immediately go fishing!
Chef - A great class for players who enjoy feeding people with powerful buffs (and debuffs).
Shopkeeper - Gain an early edge for building and shopkeeping.
We've heard a lot of your feedback and have put a lot of effort into bringing back some more of the faster, flexible Legacy combat feel while still retaining our intended design for the game to remain a challenge.
We've added a ton of cool new attributes, like setting enemies on fire with a critical hit or dealing more damage when you're hungry or wet! There are also plenty of new attributes designed for hybrid builds!
NPCs will share the same rules as you do with stamina. They'll need it to continue blocking, sprinting, and dodging.
When out of stamina, enemies are also more likely to get knocked down.
You can play around this by wearing out or outlasting enemies!
Some enemies will now have armor.
Armor will prevent stagger effects.
To deal with armor, we've added a few new mechanics to damage types:
Blunt damage deals extra damage to armor and is considered non-lethal. Furniture will have some great use now!
Piercing damage will have a portion of its damage apply to the health underneath even if there's armor.
Slashing damage will do extra damage to enemies that have no armor.
You'll be able to see this information when you hover over an item.
If you deal enough damage to enemies without taking any damage, you'll start to heat up and your attacks will become stronger giving every fight a rush of adrenaline!
As your combo grows, you'll get:
Faster attacks
Faster reloads
More damage
Increased movement speed
Cool effects as your combo increases
We've improved the melee lunging to give you better hit registration and better control. You'll be able to hit your target much more consistently, especially those on the floor.
If you do more damage when knocking down an enemy, they'll stay down for much longer allowing you to strateigcally wail on downed enemies.
We've overhauled the damage and stat requirements for many items and weapons so that more weapons and builds are viable and fun!
The armor system adds more pay-offs for weapon variety, as items like chairs can now also deal blunt damage to break armor more easily.
Instead of requiring dexterity upgrades, you'll now be able to invincibility frame dash through attacks and parry as a level 0 character.
In its place, we've added extra parry and dash bonuses in the dexterity tree:
Dexterity 10: Parrying an attack adds to your combo meter.
Dexterity 12: Parried bullets deal +100% more damage.
Dexterity 60: Add 0.5s to dash invincibility and allows you to survive falls with it.
You can now get up from a ragdoll earlier if you rapidly press the movement buttons!
We've been working on Saleblazers, previously called Please Buy Something, since 2019! That means we've been on a pretty old version of Unity for a while.
Saleblazers is now finally on a much more modern version of Unity 6.3, giving us access to many new engine features and optimizations.
The biggest feature in Unity 6 is the ability to asynchronously spawn in-game objects.
We've added this throughout our game to manage and reduce hitching when loading in a ton of objects at once.
We went through a ton of our code and prevented unnecessary memory allocation events that could permanently balloon memory up. This also helps reduce hitching.
Previously, when you played the game for a while, you would see RAM go up and stay up permanently even when you teleported back to the starting area.
You should now see this number stay at a healthier baseline level now.
We've also optimized the memory usage of the game to use less baseline RAM through streaming in more assets only when they're needed. Many leaks are also now resolved.
On some systems, this reduction was as much as going from 12 GB down to 5 GB!
If all goes well, you shouldn't really notice any changes, but we undertook a very complicated process of fully migrating our quests and dialogue to use and dynamically stream in JSON text files instead of our binary assets.
This allows us to save on a ton of memory by only accessing data when needed.
And, you can technically mod quests and dialogue now!
Terrain now looks much better from far away! Here's a before and after of what unloaded terrains look like.
We've also optimized the far-away terrain to be much cheaper, especially on lower-end devices.
We simplified the world space materials down to a regular, cheaper material, and combined the entire world into just 2 atlas materials (1 for terrain, 1 for meshes on top), which should really help with the GPU load.
Here are a few test results of our optimizations:
Steam Deck: +50%
Decent Windows PC: +47%
Decent Windows PC in Large Player Shop: +71.5%
Overall, it's a great success! This section is rather short, but we spent a lot of time on optimization in this update. We're still working on some more optimizations, so it'll be even better.
This update tunes shops to be a little more fun in preparation for our upcoming story missions.
Shops will now simulate operations every day without requiring you to visit them and performance is greatly improved.
We've improved customer patience to both feel more cozy and realistic.
They'll have much more patience now, making larger shops much more viable.
Customers will not leave star rating reviews until they've already picked up an item.
Their star rating will still rely on a variety of factors, like if they witnessed a fight, felt like an area of your shop was too ugly, or were too thirsty.
It will be more of a matter of accommodating customers instead of fighting against the clock, though.
To prevent a buildup of people, customers will now leave if they've browsed multiple containers without picking anything up and, more importantly, also won't leave a negative review.
We hope this adds more variety to viable shop setups and makes shopkeeping much more fun!
Customer review feedback is back!
We've added back the legacy shop music that plays when you're in your shop, modified by your last haggle amount.
We hear a lot of you liked selling guns to elderly customers for some reason, so we've brought them back to walk along the roads of The Island along with the many other customer types.
Pop Pop's shop is a lot more of a fixer-upper now. It still has some things to get you started, like a campfire and bed, but you'll be able to build and expand the exact shop you want a lot better now.
In the lobby settings when creating a new world, you can enable the "Full" starting shop from before, if you prefer.
We also added a few changes here and there to make the experience even better.
We heard a lot of feedback about how the camera was too cramped, so we've spent some time tweaking the camera to make it farther than before.
Since we've also optimized the game quite a bit, we're also able to bump up the default FoV to 80.
If you liked how The Immersive update felt, you can also snap the camera distance gameplay setting all the way back down to 0.2!
Or all the way up...
We also hear that a lot of you feel that your shoulders are too broad, so we've brought back the Legacy animations for the female body type since the new animations are designed for the male body type.
We've also brought back the old dodge animation for some weapons like the fists and sword as well as the sprint stop animation.
Based on player feedback, we've changed everyone to move faster both in and outside the shop.
We've removed the long camera animations so that you can enjoy faster world map teleports again. However, we've kept the channel time so that teleporting away while in combat is balanced.
Since there are so many new mechanics that revolve around your health, you can now see how many health points you have since stats have gotten progressively more important.
Since there's a larger focus on stats, we've improved and added back damage numbers to the game.
Different damage types (fire, water) and crits will appear as differently colored numbers.
This can be toggled off in the settings and will be enabled by default.
We've also brought back characters flashing when damaged or healed for better combat feedback.
You can turn this off in the settings.
Friendly NPCs will now be a lot more forgiving if you accidentally hit them when trying to rescue them from an enemy.
They may also gift you a piece of their clothing after the fight's over!
Holding the interact key on items in the world now quick-uses them.
For example, you can now hold E on an apple to eat it directly.
We've added interactable item info in chat!
For example, when someone catches a rare fish, you'll be able to hover over its name to check it out.
If you enter a zone that is over-leveled for you with enemies that are a bit too tough, it will now show you in red text.
There's now a new effect to better communicate when an enemy is knocked down.
Dashing (left shift) will now propel you much farther, and the cooldown for dashing will now start when you begin dashing instead of when you finish dashing.
It should now be harder to fall when you're trying to hit knocked-down enemies.
There are a lot more things that we've done throughout the game, like, for example, new weapon trails that help communicate hurtbox timings or improved UI that communicates stats better.
With the engine upgrade also finally complete, this patch marks the final sandbox-style update for Saleblazers!
We plan on having all future major updates be story updates!
Thanks for reading! We hope you have a lot of fun cooking and fishing!