Hello and welcome to Roguefort 0.5.3.
With this latest update, the world is more alive, more reactive, more magical, and more dangerous...
But first, I'd like to extend a warm welcome to three talented pixel artists joining the Roguefort dev team:
ArkHaven
ElfieTheEsp
Merlin the Questioner
The Discord sprite discussions have been popping off, and I'm thrilled to bits that the new sprite work is debuting in this update.
I've also started migrating new artwork into the demo, so you'll see a lot more polish and sense of world, with art evoking the history, cultures, lore, cosmology, and sagas of the continent. This has taken a lot months of work, but we are finally getting it shipped bit by bit.
Anyway, without further ado, here's everything on offer with 0.5.3:
1. The Rind Wars simulation layer (Phase 1)
Prize caves are now contested territory - the first phase of the Rind Wars simulation layer I hinted at back in 0.4.7. You can now:
Raid a prize cave and fight its faction garrison.
Capture caves for an ally - their vendors start stocking the cave's prize cheeses.
Trigger supply shortages in the dispossessed faction's towns. Watch their prize cheese grey out with an ETA.
See refugees from fallen caves wander into allied towns.
Defend a friendly garrison for rep with that faction.
Trigger rep cascades that ripple across allied and enemy patrols.
2. Living Cave Workshops
Prize caves used to be vibe rooms. They're working cheesemaking compounds now, with staff, rituals, and an economy of their own. Wander one in peacetime and you'll find:
Apprentices, masters, porters, and a doorkeeper actually doing the work - bustle, not set dressing.
A right-click context menu on every role - buy from the porter, ask the master for a tasting, pick up apprentice grunt-work for rep.
A day-paced tasting ritual with a 5% legendary jackpot and meaningful buffs.
Lootable barrels in the aging cellars.
Functional aging slots - drop your own wheels in, come back later for matured product.
A first-entry helper modal so you actually know what's in front of you.
Lose a cave's faction in the Wars and the whole place shutters into refugee mode - the bustle gone, the doors closed, the residents drifting toward allied towns. Cheese Wars and Workshops are the same simulation seen from two angles.
3. Atmospheric Overhaul
The sky is hand-authored now - 22 cloud silhouettes across cumulus, stratus, cirrus, storm, fog, snow, and sandstorm. You can now:
Watch storm fronts barrel across the sky at proper parallax while cirrus crawls.
Stand in real layered rain and snow with full-screen splashes and storm FX.
Hear it too - 9 looping ambience tracks for rain, snow, storm, and wind crossfade with the weather.
See the whole scene grade in real time as conditions shift.
I also improved the frame-rate of rain and the way that it falls, for even more immersion during inclement weather
4. Fire in the hole
Three spells - raclette scrape, fondue pool, and ashfire bolt - now genuinely set the world on fire. You can now:
Set tiles on fire and watch it spread to flammable neighbours.
Char terrain permanently behind you.
Burn anything caught in the AOE, including peaceful NPCs (with a right-click Attack confirmation).
Douse yourself by walking through water.
Torch Hearthmere if you feel that kind of urge
5. The Terroir Perk Rework
The auto-revealed perk on level-up is gone. The discipline tree and keystones from 0.5.0 are intact. You can now:
Pick 1 of 3 perks at every level-up, or reroll the slate for gold.
Discover 175 perks across 4 rarities (Common, Uncommon, Rare, Mythic).
Build around 4 charges - Lattice, Ember, Bloom, Brine - tied to the Veined / Red lineages and Bloomy / Brined disciplines.
Generate charges on hit, on crit, on kill, on wait, and on damage taken.
Consume or scale per-charge, or gate huge effects behind charge thresholds.
Builds finally are actually builds, with synergies and complex emergent stacks of mechanics, instead of being a flat stack of stat bumps.
6. The Earthshaping Toolkit
A new Tools tab on the overworld. You can now shape the land directly:
Pack - tamp grass, bushes, and flowers into packed earth. Free, fast.
Clear - de-bush a tile down to tall grass.
Cobble - packed earth into a minor road.
Pave - packed earth into a major road.
Sow - undo Pack and bring the grass back.
Plant Tree - 1 wood.
Build your own trails through the wilderness and your own road network between settlements.
The Hay Loop
Thanks to suggestions from ArkHaven and also Merlin the Questioner, there's now three new ways to keep livestock fed:
Scythe tall grass into fresh grass.
Dry it on a new drying rack structure into hay bales.
Pay Hayreld - a new tier-1 herder NPC northwest of Hearthmere - to keep you in hay if you'd rather not scythe.
Troughs now show a four-stage food ladder - empty, almost empty, partial haybale, full - so you can read the feed state from across the farm. Thanks Merlin for the new trough sprites!
Other things you can now do, in no particular order:
Befriend a Silk Weaver - shear silk on a regular cycle, no spider killing required. (Elfie)
Tame a Loomspinner - a rare wild spider that becomes a tier-3 companion. Fights with you, immobilizes on hit, and passively spins silk while happy.
Hunt the Hoarfrost Spider - the cold-biome silk variant in taiga and tundra. (Ghost Steelix)
Encounter new cave fauna - Cave-Bear, Cave-Cat, Cave-Rat, Crystal Hound, and Crystal Centipede, all with dedicated 16x16 sprites.
Open the Character Panel (Shift+Y) - stats, terroir tree, masteries, factions, status, all in one place. There's a new @ Character button on the HUD too.
Re-open Terroir Attunement on demand (Shift+T) - no longer only available at the moment of level-up.
Lock and pin any item type - no more accidentally selling your lucky stiletto.
Read 294 books (up from 70), every one with cover art, on a new pixel-art parchment reader with proper paginated page-flip.
Step past friendly NPCs on bump - no more getting stuck in doorways.
See full rooms from inside - the FOV no longer clips your own walls. (ArkHaven)
Read accurate vendor signage - building labels finally match what's inside. (ArkHaven)
Collect feathers from hens on kill or processing. (Elfie)
See branch lock-in warnings before you close off a discipline.
See alliance rep tradeoffs on guild-origin perks up-front.
The art also got a big overhaul this patch - 120 upgrade icons, 175 perk icons, Sierra-style splash art for character creation and every book, and painted discipline cards on the level-up modal. For the new splash art, I was very much channelling late-1980s Sierra adventure games and early-90s RPGs with the aesthetic.
We also have 13 brand new sprites in the tileset thanks to the pixel art team (ElfieTheEsp, Merlin the Questioner, and ArkHaven).
Also, roads autotile properly now and have Bayer dithering on the edges as they graduate into non-road tiles, and ground cover got a layered procgen pass.
Tuning
Charred ground darkens relative to the base terrain - charred grass still reads as grass.
Dungeon water reads as visibly rounded while still keeping letter-shaped pools legible.
Structure HP bars hide unless damaged.
Strikethroughs dropped from unaffordable build-menu items.
Gold currency properly split from the gold_nugget material - coins are an abstract counter, nuggets are a physical material.
Performance
Save imports mirror to disk now, so Steam Cloud can't clobber an imported save on the next sync.
Defensive WAIT throttle plus a processTurn short-circuit on death - covers a class of input-lag bugs around held-space and rapid-fire input during death animations.
Bug fixes
Vat / press / cave bump-collect duping. (ArkHaven)
Cheese commission and Caseine BELT quest turn-ins - right-click and bump routes both work now.
Scholar identify panel - 3 separate bugs. (SamV)
Quest Log Completed tab no longer loses history. (SamV)
Keyboard Enter on "Save & Title" no longer swallowed. (SamV)
Hostile creatures no longer spawn inside fenced enclosures.
Phasing creatures (ghosts, wraiths) no longer enter dungeon walls.
Settlement NPC vendor prices now match the merchant's price modifier.
Brown ± harvestable-crop overlay. (ArkHaven)
Book Collection hover flicker. (ArkHaven)
Taming rope balance - pity counter + bait modifier on rare spawns. (Elfie)
Duplicate faction and village quests offered by different NPCs - deduped.
Keyboard double-fire on inventory equip and drop.
[Space] Continue now dismisses war-cheese and system-helper modals.
BELT bump turn-in no longer blocked by a sleeping NPC; demo dungeons restored to the world map.
"River curse" flora regrowth crash - guarded.
Perk reroll now reads canonical resources.gold.
Dark rectangular patches behind out-of-FOV trees.
Dark-brown background under fences.
Stray glyph overlay on perk selection cards.
Character select faction-name overflow.
Context-menu submenu clobbering.
Thanks and see you in Discord chat
This patch, like all the patches in the game's history, leans heavily on playtester feedback. Special thanks to the Discord community and the playtester team.
And as always, big thanks to my family for their ongoing patience and support while I keep working in the margins, often late at night.
Have a good weekend, and thank you again for playing.
Timmy