Hi folks, in the previous journal we talked about the addition of the Wasteland region and the town of Hamor, along with new camp and combat maps, as well as Steam Deck improvements.
But that is not all the Hamor update brings.
There are even more camping improvements, especially in how you set and manage duties. Instead of having to trigger duties manually each time, you now set them once and they trigger automatically when you rest. Rewards have been increased too, and several duties now offer useful bonuses for vampire characters. There are new camp duties to Gather Herbs, Gather Reagents, Harvest Materials, Catch Rats, Capture Thralls and Harvest Blood.
Sandbox mode now has a new quick start option, skipping all introductions and the initial party gathering quest by giving you a randomized team of adventurers. You can jump in and start playing instantly.
You can now interact more with all the merchants across the world, using similar options available for random NPCs. You can steal from merchants, feed on them, flirt with them, blackmail them and more. But be careful, your relationship with a merchant affects their prices.
Most importantly, feeding on them could kill them, so there is that too.
Skill checks are now tied to the region's difficulty. Harder zones demand more from you to succeed, while easier zones become more manageable as your skills improve, creating a stronger sense of progression and less of a treadmill grind.
Beyond new features and bug fixes, there are also quality of life upgrades. You can now quickly see your unspent SP and PP in the character sheet.
In the conversation UI, a new button lets you view skill ranks, your own, your party's, or individual members’, along with estimated success chances for easy, moderate, and hard checks in your current region.
In the inventory and barter UIs, you can now move your mouse toward associated skills without the selected item losing focus.
Asking for directions or using fast travel is also more reliable, no longer showing destinations that do not exist in your current town.
Contract rewards have been buffed, and you can now view the base cost and any requirements of your potential rewards. Supply contracts will be more profitable and no longer feel underwhelming to complete. Good luck finding 22 units of Siren's Kiss. On the other hand, it'll now be worth your while, and you won't get ripped off.
Finally, the world will feel more alive overall, with the game now generating additional random NPCs as needed. It will also attempt to recover automatically tiles in saves where those tiles were marked as empty after the pool of random NPCs had run out.
Once I wrap up the essential tests in the coming days and consider the update ready to ship, it will go live for everyone. In the meantime, you can currently play build 0.7.74 of the Hamor update in the public beta branch. It includes everything we've talked about in this and the previous journals, along with a few dozens of bug fixes, new features, quality of life improvements, and other balance tweaks.
Have fun, and let me know if you run into any issues in the beta or have any questions!