Hey everyone,
This is a secret little hotfix update - we are still technically on 0.20.0 of the playtest build, but here's uhhh the rest of it (and not because I forgot to update the version number before building it).
It's mostly a bunch of bug fixes and polish, so it's a big massive thanks to the community, as it always is.
But it also has some very cool features.
2.5D mode gets a lot of love - it should look and feel much better!
Also, you can engage in social activity a lot more now, because that code had somehow gone dead (it wasn't being called in the NPC interaction menus), and so I wired it up and added some polish and UX to it too for making it more legible to players.
The Crossing mode (the one where you generate entirely procedurally generated worlds and histories) got a huge amount of customisation options and also a preview for the world you generate.
And there's now a MASTERY leaderboard for the competitive dungeons (well, the one dungeon currently available). Which means it rewards skill and knowledge above speed. But the speedrunning leaderboard is, of course, still there.
In a nutshell:
- Talking to NPCs is reachable at last. The whole system (relationships, favours, gossip, courtship, grudges) has been sitting in the game for two and a half months, one setting away from ever actually firing for anybody. It's wired up properly now, and every NPC has a relationship you can read right on their menu.
- The Crossing (how your world gets generated) is rebuilt as the Worldsmith. Thirty-six options across six groups, a map preview painted from your actual world, presets, and a history you can watch play out year by year.
- The Plinth of Deeds at the Monadic Descent gets a second face. Alongside the speed board there's now a Mastery board, scored on how much of a run you actually did rather than how fast you did it.
- Another big pass on the 2.5D view: movement holds the grid properly, combat lands better, dungeons look like dungeons instead of violet smears, and night is actually visible again.
- A big pile of fixes off your reports below: fishing, travel getting stuck, settlements, and more.
Thanks as always for testing this into shape.
Tim
Talking to people
- Conversations with settlement NPCs are reachable at last. The social layer (affinity, topics, replies, gifts, introductions, courtship, grudges, gossip) sat behind a setting that changed its default a month before the layer even shipped, so nobody has ever reached it walking normally.
- Every NPC's relationship reads right on their menu, between their status and their temperament. No raw number, just where you actually stand with them.
- Spend a moment together and Share some food are now offered to any settlement NPC who isn't your spouse, alongside Talk.
- Talking nudges the relationship once a day. A grudge or a bond forming announces itself the first time it happens, and a strong reaction ripples outward: "Her husband Bram will hear of it."
- NPC talk pools nearly doubled: four work lines per role, two lines about themselves, deeper how-are-you responses, and no topic dead-ends any more.
- The bard at the Old Mouth actually sings now. His song had been keyed to the wrong kind of record, so the one bard placed as market flavour had no song row at all. (datsheeptho)
- The barkeep's line about the bard "taking requests" is reworded. The bard plays for the room. There was never a request system behind that line. (datsheeptho)
The Worldsmith
- Crossing generation is rebuilt as the Worldsmith. Thirty-six options across six groups (land, sky, peoples, settling, your account, your crossing), ten presets, and a live map preview painted from your actual generated world, showing holdings, danger, rivers, roads, ruins and your landing site.
- "Watch the account" plays your shore's history year by year: landfall, expansion, wars with named battles, and a peace that can move a border.
- Wars, figures, sites, artifacts and named eras all come out of that same simulation, and a settlement that falls shows up on the ground afterward as a ruin.
- Landing is never hostile. Every origin gets a small, low-danger village held by someone who won't turn on you the moment you step ashore.
- Existing saves are untouched by this. A Crossing rolled with no options set is byte-identical to what it generated before this update.
The Plinth of Deeds
- Each Monadic Descent gate's leaderboard gets a second face. Swiftest ranks by speed, as before. Mastery ranks by a score built from floors cleared, guardians beaten, kills, gold and treasure hauled, and how little damage you took getting there.
- PageUp and PageDown swap between the two faces. The existing Global / Your runs toggle works the same on both.
- The Keeper of Deeds now mentions that the stone reads two ways.
The 2.5D view
- Movement holds the grid properly now. Walking used to drift off its own tiles and could sometimes skip one outright, and the health bar over your head could slide out of sync with your body. All three came from the same offset math, and are fixed together.
- Strikes swing toward their target at any camera angle. They used to read the compass instead of the camera, so an attack could visibly swing sideways at someone standing dead ahead.
- Heavy swings, an overhead chop or a pickaxe on rock, land a camera shake again. It had quietly stopped reaching the 2.5D view at all.
- Kills leave something behind now. A creature used to blink out of existence the instant it died. Now it crumples onto the tile and leaves a blood decal instead, matching the 2D view.
- Damage numbers hang at the right height over a creature of any size, instead of a fixed height calibrated for the old, one-size voxel blocks.
- Doors and windows hold their fade properly, instead of flashing solid on every step taken near them.
- Brick coursing above a door or below a window lines up with the wall around it, instead of restarting its own pattern partway up.
- Tilt-shift blur at the top and bottom of the screen is toned down. Distant trees keep their pixel edges now instead of dissolving into a smear.
- Dungeon floors read as stone again. They had been rendering as a saturated violet that the 2D view never actually shows a player.
- Stairs back to the surface stay visible at every camera angle, instead of collapsing into a dark post at some of them.
- Dungeon wall tops read as stone, not black holes.
- Magma pools in a dungeon render as crisp orange magma, instead of the blurred pink smear the water shader had been painting them as.
- Your character faces forward properly at every camera angle. It used to walk backwards at some of them.
- Idle breathing settles onto one rhythm, instead of two competing periods beating against each other.
- Step hop and mount gallop reach the 2.5D view. Both only ever played in the 2D view before.
- Rotating the camera no longer throws faint vertical hairlines across the player, the campfire, trees and grass.
- Resizing the window mid-walk keeps the world on its own glide, instead of snapping it a tile out of place.
- Beams, lightning and lobbed spells stand up properly in the scene, instead of lying flat on the ground. A spell lobbed east used to travel north instead of toward its actual target.
- Spells keep their proper colour under the scene's lighting, instead of washing out toward grey.
- Brimstone Wheel and Carrion Bloom, the two busiest spells in the game, stop causing a hitch partway through the cast.
- Night in 2.5D is lit properly again. Away from a light source, under fog or rain, the world had gone nearly unreadable. Five separate causes are fixed together, including a night grade that had been reading the wrong point in the day-night cycle since the day it was written. Noon looks different as a result too: brighter, more neutral, with a real golden hour at dusk.
- Build reach gets a real border around it, instead of a green dash that vanished over anything unbuildable inside the square. (bossman62)
Combat and the log
- Healing in the detailed combat log now says what it healed and from what ("+4 health (regeneration)"), instead of a bare, sometimes nameless number. (samv123)
- Force Attack (Shift+F) lets keyboard and controller players start a fight with a docile animal, the same row mouse players already reach by right-click. (samv123)
Quests
- "Toad Skins" is renamed "Marsh Toad Skins", matching the marsh toad that actually carries them rather than the plain toad standing next to it, which doesn't. (samv123)
- Fishermen can finally be asked for work. The role has stood in coastal settlements for a while with nothing to offer. Now he trades a catch for gold, the same as any other village job. (.scarletfan)
- Main-story dialogue has always sent you to the Undermaw for the endgame. The quest log finally names it too, instead of staying silent the whole way there. (datsheeptho)
- Archaffineur Crennel gets staged into the room for his own cutscene, with a proper frame around the dialogue, instead of floating in front of whichever character you'd bumped into. (datsheeptho)
Fishing
- Casting a line through a closed door or window no longer works. A wall stops a cast now, the same as it stops you. (rubberychicken)
- Catching more fish than your backpack can hold now spills the extra at your feet with a message, instead of quietly pushing your pack past its limit. (rubberychicken, datsheeptho)
- Dodged enemy attacks make sound again. A dodge used to skip the hit noise entirely, so a build that dodges often fought in near silence. (rubberychicken)
- Driftwood pulled up on a line now yields a wood plank, matching what you'd get salvaging it off the shore. (rubberychicken)
- River trout stay out of ocean catches now, and a boat fishes the water it's actually floating on instead of always fishing as if at sea. (rubberychicken)
- Fishing's level-up line now arrives on the catch that actually leveled you, not the one before it. (rubberychicken)
- Cheese wheels aging in your backpack actually age now. Wheels kept on your belt aged as intended. Ones in the pack had been stuck for two months. (elfietheesp55)
Companions and livestock
- A pet ordered to stay back survives the fight it was told to sit out. Iron beetles especially had kept stepping in front of you and taking hits meant for you, and a stay-back order now actually holds a position instead of just refusing to fight up close. (datsheeptho)
- Led livestock queue through single-file corridors instead of jamming up behind each other. A cow blocking the path used to strand every animal behind it. (thesquirrel_74982)
- Cooked meat works as taming bait, and bait sitting in your quick slots is now recognized too, alongside bait in your backpack. (datsheeptho)
Settlements and the world
- Townsfolk flee the actual threat now, not you. A citizen startled by a nearby monster used to run from wherever you were standing instead. (thesquirrel_74982)
- Villages straddling a border between two guilds' territory no longer hand out quests for both sides from residents thirty feet apart. A settlement's allegiance is read from the settlement now, not from the tile a person happens to stand on. (thesquirrel_74982)
- Lines meant for dry land stop firing at sea, including a caravan you'd met ashore appearing to move on 150 turns later, over open water.
- Settlements now say why they refuse to let you fill in water, instead of the same vague line an unrelated build error gives. (iso5455)
- Sand, both beach and desert, can be sown back to wild grass, the same as packed earth already could. (rubberychicken)
- Objects placed over rock or another tricky spot keep the ground they were actually placed on, instead of borrowing whatever ground happens to be nearby once you mine around it. (rubberychicken)
- Ship decks hold their colour under the sailor's feet during a bow shot, a melee swing, or any other fight aboard. (rubberychicken)
- Eclipses now end an automatic trip on their own, the same way running into a monster does. Night spawning is the whole danger of an eclipse, and nothing used to notice the sky had gone dark. (bossman62)
- The character sheet, the quest log and the upgrade screen all show the same per-branch tally of a tradition's picks now, and the character sheet's pick list is no longer capped at eight. (trespiratesque)
Travel
- Auto travel no longer halts mid-trip without saying why. A townsperson standing on your route, a bed or tent that appeared partway through a long walk, and an owned strongbox you'd cross on the way could each stop a trip cold with nothing in the log to explain it. All three now get walked around, or the trip ends and names what stopped it. (thesquirrel_74982)
Performance on veteran saves
- Very long-played saves hold their file size instead of slowly growing it. A chopped tree used to leave its hit points behind on the grass that replaced it, and that orphaned number rode along in every save from then on. (theartolater)
- Citizens in a large, long-played city skip the wasted search for commutes they could never reach in the first place, and a worker whose commute is truly long (a big city can run 400 tiles across) can now actually route there instead of just failing quickly. (theartolater)
Known issues
- Only the first raid gate is open. The Dyadic Vault, the Triadic Gate and the Tetradic Keep are sealed.
- In 2.5D, adjacent carpets still draw as separate rugs. The 2.5D view draws straight from the tiles and cannot see the new pattern yet.
- Tilt-shift depth of field is off on the Steam Deck and on software graphics, where it costs more performance than it is worth.
- 27 dungeon floors in 2,700 still have a region cut off from the stairs by the shape of the bedrock itself.