Adventure Craft · build 24985347 · published
Five years. That’s how long we’ve been working toward getting this version of Adventure Craft out into the world, and it feels genuinely surreal to finally be able to say that the new build is live on the main branch.
When Adventure Craft first came out, I was still learning a huge amount about making games. I was incredibly happy that there were people who saw what I was trying to make and really loved it, but I also knew there was so much more I wanted to do with it. I wanted the world to be bigger, stranger, deeper, more rewarding to explore, and ultimately much closer to the game I had in my head.
A lot of life has happened while we’ve been making it. Adventure Craft has been part of my life for around ten years now. During that time all three of my children were born, I lost both my mother and father, we all lived through a global pandemic. Through all of it, I never really stopped working on this game.
And honestly, the people who have supported the game are a huge part of why I kept going. The feedback, encouragement, bug reports, ideas, Discord conversations, and just knowing that there are people out there who genuinely love Adventure Craft has meant a lot to me. As far as I’m concerned, if even a relatively small group of people really love something I’ve created, then it was worth creating.
I also have to thank Chris Morvant, my programming partner, because none of this would exist without him. He built and continues to build the tools that bring all my artwork to life! Chris has stuck with this project for years and put an enormous amount of work into keeping Adventure Craft alive and turning all of my increasingly ridiculous ideas into an actual working game. We are genuinely independent — just two people who have continued working on this thing because we believe in it.
A ridiculous amount.
The character roster has grown enormously. There are loads of new weapons, equipment, enemies and things to find. We’ve added and rebuilt tile maps throughout the world, updated factions, reworked bosses, expanded loot and substantially increased the amount of content you can discover.
The Underworld has been completely overhauled into a huge new subterranean area with its own environments, enemies, ruins and rare loot. There is a lot down there now, and there is still more we intend to add and improve.
There are also many systems that are now much further along than they were in the previous public build.
One of the biggest experiments is the new Card Parts system. Card Parts allow you to find and build up modifiers that can change the properties of cards and potentially create some extremely interesting combinations. It’s a very new system, though, and I want to be upfront about that. The interface still needs work, the balance still needs work, and there are probably things about it that are going to change once we see how people actually use it.
So if you start experimenting with Card Parts, tell us what you think. This is exactly the kind of system that will get better through people actually playing with it and finding the things that are fun, confusing, overpowered, useless, ridiculous or completely broken.
The same applies to balance across the rest of the game. We now have a much stronger foundation, but there is still a lot of tuning to do. We’ll be looking closely at weapon damage, equipment, enemy strength, item rarity, loot distribution and progression. I want rare things to actually feel exciting to discover, strong enemies to feel worth defeating, and the game to challenge you enough that achieving something difficult actually feels rewarding.
I briefly considered trying to make a complete list of everything that has changed, and then realized it would be insane.
There has been so much content added, rebuilt and changed over the last five years that the patch notes would probably be longer than anyone would actually want to read — and we’re still changing things now.
So I’m going to leave a lot of it for you to discover.
There are new characters, creatures, weapons, equipment, locations, loot, maps, systems and a whole bunch of weird little things scattered throughout Adventure Craft. I think it’s more fun if some of that still surprises you.
Now that the game is finally back on the main branch, I’m also going to start doing regular news and content posts again. Instead of trying to explain five years of development all at once, I can start showing you different systems, creatures, locations and things we’re working on as we go.
We’ve been working insanely hard just to get this build into your hands, but there is still plenty to do.
Between now and Steam’s PvE Survival Crafting Fest, we’re going to be actively improving the live build, fixing problems, balancing systems and responding to feedback. And after that, the work continues.
The plan is to get back into a much more consistent rhythm of updates and keep pushing Adventure Craft toward full release.
So this really feels less like the end of a five-year update and more like the beginning of a new era for Adventure Craft.
If you’ve been following the game for years, thank you for sticking around.
If you played the old version and are coming back to see what happened to this strange game, welcome back.
And if this is the first time you’ve played Adventure Craft, welcome to the madness.
Go explore. Break things. Find weird stuff. Get killed by something stupid. Tell us what works, tell us what doesn’t, and tell us what you find.
It feels unbelievably good to finally have Adventure Craft back out there again.
Thank you for helping us get here.
James and Chris
Anteria has set up and has been managing a fan Discord for Adventure Craft, and it’s become a great place to talk about the game, share discoveries, report problems, suggest ideas, and compare notes with other players.
I hang around in there pretty regularly and check in to see how everyone is getting on with the game, so if you’ve got feedback on the new build, there’s a good chance I’ll see it there.
If you’d like to join us: