Hello merchants,
Update 0.5.6 is live! The game stays noticeably smoother in long play sessions, carrying valuable quest cargo now puts you at greater risk from bandits, and starting a new game is more approachable. On top of that: longer chat messages, quicker ways to reach your friends, and a solid batch of convoy fixes.
Gameplay and Balancing
Quests
- The "Duty Calls" quest now includes a short tutorial explaining Favours the first time you see it.
- Declining "Duty Calls" no longer lowers your Reputation with the Earl, and it will now first appear a few Payrolls later.
- Carrying a "Precious Cargo", "Important Letter" or "Rare Item" quest item in your convoy roughly doubles the risk of a Bandit Attack along the route; a "Treasure Chest" roughly triples it.
Starting a New Game
- The "New Game" button is now directly available in the pause menu instead of behind an Account submenu.
- More Easy settlements are now offered when starting a new game.
Trading
- When selling at the Produce Exchange, the amount slider now starts at "First boundary" by default instead of "Maximum", so you no longer accidentally sell a large stock for poor prices. You can still change this in the Settings under "Slider behaviour".
Interface and Performance
- Chat messages can now contain up to 300 characters instead of 100.
- You can now jump to a friend's settlement by clicking their settlement badge in the Friends list.
- The game stays more responsive in long play sessions: several performance issues with the map, travels and settlement loading that built up over time have been fixed.
Fixes
Settlement
- In production buildings, the notice "There are workers missing." showed up before "The current production cycle has ended."; the order is now correct.
- New settlers' Favours were not always immediately updated in the Status Bar.
Convoys
- The Route Planner did not correctly block a route if a required bridge was not built.
- Toggling the "follow convoy" option in the Route Planner locked the camera until the menu was closed.
- Convoys travelling very long routes could stop updating correctly on the map for other players.
- A Bandit Attack rolled on the very last step of a route could get stuck and block that merchant's Payroll.
- Entering a settlement from the map could fail if the surrounding area was not fully loaded yet.
Chat
- Private chats no longer open automatically when launching the game.
- The chat text input no longer scrolls vertically while typing.
- Deleting text in chat no longer removes an extra space unintuitively.
- The Friends list now shows each friend's own settlement instead of always your own.
Quests and Conversations
- Leaving a conversation in the Tavern or the Den of Thieves while waiting for a response could show the wrong result or get stuck.
- The tutorial could get stuck if you opened the first chest before it told you to.
Thank you for playing and for all your reports!