Hey all,
I'm excited to announce that Roguefort's first raid dungeon, The Monadic Descent, now has a working leaderboard! This is the first of a series of raid dungeons that are accessible by going into the Old Mouth (the game's multiplayer trading hub) and heading to the north-east staircase.
Test your skill at the game by trying to beat the top scores. It is essentially a speedrun leaderboard, which I think adds an extra level of depth to the game by getting you to think and play in a way that the rest of the game doesn't focus so much on. Anyone can play - whether you're a god-like level 100 with mythic gear, or you literally just rolled a fresh character, it's dynamically balanced so anyone can participate.
In other news, thanks as always for the nonstop flow of feedback, suggestions, and bug reports. I'm working around the clock to address them all.
That's about it for now! Thanks for playing and see you in the Discord.
Tim
Legendary items could roll impossible stats
This one changes items you already own, so it gets the full explanation.
A legendary item multiplies its stats by area level. For damage that is the right idea, because the monsters you swing it at grow with area level too. But the same multiplier was reaching seven stats that are measured against things which never grow at all: vision range, crit chance, gold find, item find, sneak bonus, noise reduction and sneak attack bonus.
- Those seven compounded exactly the way damage does, and the rolls got silly. A level 51 legendary could roll 1694 tiles of vision, or 19,768 noise reduction on a scale that runs from 0 to 100. (rubberychicken)
- Your existing items repair themselves the first time you load the save. The repair runs one way only. An item that comes down does not come back up.
- Damage, armour, HP, lifesteal and thorns are untouched, and nothing about them changes. Armour and evasion look like percentages but are really points into a mitigation curve that widens with content tier, so the thing they measure against does grow, and they keep scaling.
- Runaway vision was worse than a funny number. The game refuses to spawn a creature anywhere you can already see, so one bow with +69 vision could switch the world's spawning off by itself. That end is fixed too.
Raid leaderboards go global
- The trial leaderboards are Steam leaderboards now, one per gate. Until this patch the plinth beside each gate only showed records from your own machine, so the all-time top ten was a lonelier place than it looked. Every finished trial now stands on the same board as everyone else's.
- Leaderboard records survive a full disk. Record keeping got the same full-disk handling the save slots already had, and if space really has run out, it is the record that goes, never the run.
New things you can do
- The Retracing. You can move a tradition pick. A pick used to be forever, so over-committing to one discipline capped your keystones permanently. A second tab at the Long Affinage bench lifts one pick out of a discipline and lays it down in another in a single motion, with no half-moved state to get stuck in. It costs one Reserve Mark plus the bench's escalating recast cost, and both actions push that cost up together. (rubberychicken)
- Fire your own abilities. Will-o'-Wisp, Purify and Tracker's Eye used to go off on a fixed turn timer, which is a strange fate for three turns of invisibility, because the whole value is in picking the moment. All three now fire by hand from an ability menu on Shift+U, rebindable, with a row in the panel hub for controller players. Phase Step moves into the same menu and aims where you point it instead of off your last attempted direction. The automatic firing is still there underneath, so nothing changes unless you want it to. (loukoumi, with nalathnidragon on Phase Step)
- An FAQ, in the game. 29 answers across 9 sections, on a new tab of the help screen. (samv123)
- Rearrange the quick bar. Drag a slot onto another to swap them, or onto the pack to take it off. (rubberychicken)
- Refuse a quest offer. Not every job deserves you. Turning one down rerolls it, at 10 reputation a time, twice per day. (iso5455)
- Affinage shows you what it will do to the item before you commit. (rubberychicken)
- Past the raid guardian floors, a supply shop and a well now wait for you. (bossman62)
- A full quick bar still takes a stack it can merge. Enter now combines the pair. It used to eat one. (iso5455)
- Your water pouch is linked to the thirst bar, which now draws under the belt container that fills it. (em8595)
- Demolishing a stocked storage container gets one are-you-sure. (#suggestions)
The Plane of Heroes and the Descent
- Quitting mid-trial used to teleport you home in silence and eat the run. It now does neither. (rubberychicken)
- Dying in a raid in a way the raid never registered could end a permadeath run for good. It cannot any more. (loukoumi)
- Loot lying on the ground could follow you out of the trial: four of the hub doors carried nearby items through along with you. It stays put now. (rubberychicken)
- Every voluntary exit warns you that the loot on earlier floors stays behind.
- Raid bosses could go inert mid-fight. A failed pathfind on its multi-tile body fell through to doing nothing, where it should have fallen through to a step. (rubberychicken)
- Hitting the boss made it flicker, because the recoil drew a tile-sized copy of a 4x4 body. That is gone. (rubberychicken)
- Stripping at the gate did lower the trial's difficulty after all. The last notes claimed it bought you nothing, but the one gear sample only ever read your worn slots and never your pack. Now the claim is true. (sksniperks)
- You keep your mount on an early exit. The check that puts you back in the saddle did not cover the place a trial exit drops you. (rubberychicken)
- The leaderboard plinths are redrawn to match the rest of the game's look, and their text is rewritten.
- Both players in co-op see the same dungeon walls. The client rebuilt each floor fresh from its seed while the host served the floor it remembered, and the two did not always agree. (thesquirrel_74982)
Sound
- Every dungeon floor now has an ambience. There are five ambience beds and more than fifteen dungeon biomes, and a biome without a bed of its own composed a track name with no file behind it, which the audio layer treats as a request for silence. On real seeds, a good share of every dungeon was playing nothing at all. (sksniperks)
- Raids opened on the dread drone from floor one. The ladder reuses a number that used to mean depth, so the deep-danger drone covered 14 of 15 floors and rolled five named stages into one mood. Raid floors now take their bed from their own biome.
- A humble cheese cave deserves better than the doom drone. Any one-floor location was scoring its only floor as a boss floor.
- Ambience loops used to pile up with no way to stop them. The ambient bus now has the guard the music bus always carried. (sksniperks)
The world and travel
- The world could stop. The clock froze, enemies stood still, no new townsfolk appeared, and you could walk around inside it all. It came from surviving your own death. A lethal blow queues a death record, and a Lattice Initiate charge draining after it in the same queue could heal you back above zero. The death effect then bailed because your HP was positive, the record never cleared, and every turn after that short-circuited on a player the game was certain had died. Quitting and reloading cured it. Co-op has had this fix for a while. Solo never got the equivalent, until now. (jungcodex)
- Nothing spawned once your sight got long. The game will not spawn a creature on a spot you can see, and the ring it places them in stops at 38 tiles out, so with enough vision the two rules cannot both hold and the attempt gave up. On real terrain across five seeds, sea spawns succeeded every time up to +8 vision, 34 percent of the time at +10, and never from +12. That visibility check is now capped at 34 tiles by day, and everything else that ran through the same unbounded check is converted with it: road patrols, caravans, war-bands, frontier bandits, POI vendors and wilderness hermits. The vision warning that has sat in Known issues for two patches running comes off the list. (rubberychicken, bossman62, nalathnidragon)
- Resuming auto-travel heads for the place you were actually going. None of the three ways to cancel a trip ever stored the destination. (sksniperks)
- Auto-travel gets past a lake now. The check that decides you are stuck could not see a detour, and the route planner could not walk one, so between them the trip ended at the shoreline. (sksniperks)
- Auto-travel now brakes for what you can actually see. It used to brake for anything inside an on-screen rectangle, visible or not. (sksniperks)
- Auto-travel crosses a farm plot without helping itself to the harvest.
- Auto-exit was halting on "the way is blocked" when nothing was blocking it. The planner asked whether the thing ahead was friendly, when the question that matters is whether bumping it moves you. (theartolater)
- A lake reads as a lake. The zone resolver had a branch for the ocean and nothing for lakes at all. (rubberychicken)
- No more buildings marooned out in the water. (rubberychicken)
- One compass ping reported a hostile 5,177 tiles away. The scan had no distance bound of any kind. It has one now. (theartolater)
- Chests spawn on empty tiles only. Something already standing there used to be no objection. (.lorddan)
- Accepting a single book used to re-roll every bookshelf in the world, which is a lot of consequence for one book. (sksniperks)
- Fires keep burning across a save and load.
Combat
- Fire resistance now means something to a vampire in the sun. The sun damage did its own arithmetic instead of using the shared resistance formula, and its rounding held the common 1-damage case at 1 for every resistance under 100 percent, so a vampire at 99 burned exactly as fast as one at zero. Past 100 the term went negative, and only a floor in the maths kept the sun from healing you. (rubberychicken)
- Fire resistance is now burn resistance, because that is what it always was. A census of every creature in the game found no attack that is elementally typed and no way for one to be. Typing runs one way, from your spells onto creature resistances, so the stat never had anything to do with the fire a Cinder Sprite throws at you. What it governs is burning, the Blistered tick and a vampire's sun damage, and it is named for that now. The status resist line in the same panel was under-promising too, and now says what it actually covers. (rubberychicken)
- The Pickled keystone promised 100% fire immunity and delivered it only to vampires. (rubberychicken)
- Poison immunity did nothing at all. Six travel foods grant it for up to 450 turns, and the HUD drew a faithful timer for a stat the poison tick never once read. The fix strips the poison debuff outright, because an immunity that leaves the debuff sitting on you just re-arms the damage at the next interval. (rubberychicken)
- A sentinel already in a melee used to drop that fight the instant it saw you. It stays in the fight now. (bossman62)
- What the ranged hit chance label prints is now the real number. It used to show one of the shot's two rolls, with none of its modifiers. (rubberychicken)
- A struck sleeper wakes on a Quicksilver free action. (rubberychicken)
- Clicking an adjacent foe while you hold a ranged weapon does not shove it any more. (rubberychicken)
- Direction keys still work when you started aiming with the mouse. (rubberychicken)
- Vision radius keeps up with a weapon swap. It used to lag a turn behind. (rubberychicken)
Items, loot and the pack
- A greyed-out button stops eating your click. Blocked actions grey out with their reason these days instead of vanishing, and a greyed button swallowed every click that landed on it. That cut a dead strip across the row, wider the longer the reason ran, and on a raw fish away from a fire the cook button covered nearly half of it. The keyboard went down too, because the action keys act on whatever is selected, so g to gut, e to eat and the = menu key all did nothing on any row carrying a greyed button.
- Mythic items were crossing between saves. MYTHIC was missing from the list of rarities barred from crossing saves, and the game does mint it, in culture items, livestock and four tier-6 companion species, so a 300 gold mythic culture sailed through the gate that stopped a 180 gold legendary. While I was in there, both panels claimed the community chest "only takes common and uncommon goods", which was never the rule. They now say what the rule is. (rubberychicken)
- Ships heal their decks on load, and the Ship of the Line gets its masts. The mast tables were fixed a while back, but a deck is generated once and stored on the boat item, so no ship already in a save was ever going to correct itself. A tier 6 hull carried three masts in the wrong columns, and a Ship of the Line, at 2400 gold, carried none at all, making it the most expensive raft on the water. The heal fires at all three doors, checks the deck really is one the old generator made before it touches anything, and never overwrites a cell you have built on. (elfietheesp55)
- Legendary bows no longer salvage into scrap metal, and the Wyrmscale Helm no longer breaks down into deer pelts. (rubberychicken)
- Epic items disagreed about what colour epic is. The rarity colour is a cache baked into the item at mint time, so items from different eras wore different purples. (rubberychicken)
- Epic is vivid purple again, everywhere, with the muted hue kept as a Display setting.
- Harvest tools are labelled "Tool", so a dropped pickaxe stops advertising itself as a 1-damage weapon. (rubberychicken)
- Consumable rows that stated nothing now state something, and the two dragon wheels have prices. (rubberychicken)
- Tagged stacks no longer set off the auto-stow indicator. (samv123)
- Herb Omelet and Egg Custard are cooked over a fire. (unknownuluguru_)
Town, trade and quests
- The Trader's Exchange layout is put right: wrapped item names, a split time-left column, ragged rows, and columns running off the panel edge. (loukoumi)
- Reputation hits over town livestock land only when you earned them. The check asked the creature whether it was domestic, and the spawner that places town hens never stamped the flag. (samv123)
- Your own livestock are exempt from the exposure meter now. (sksniperks)
- Gather quests warn you when the target drop overlaps town livestock. (samv123)
- Silver Tongue was promising a sell bonus it could not pay. It tells the truth now. (thesquirrel_74982)
- Mail says gold on delivery, cash being hard to come by in Roguefort. (#suggestions)
- Mail's known-names toggle survives a full column. It used to be squeezed down to nothing. (rubberychicken)
- The auction stats popup sits where it should. (rubberychicken)
- Inspecting a signpost tells you what the sign says. It used to serve a general description of signposts, which is rarely the question. (rubberychicken)
- A terroir mutation says out loud that it does not lock the wheel out of the rest. (rubberychicken)
- The Brulee Beam fork mastery description matches the spell: the fork happens at the beam's start, not on the first hit. (loukoumi)
Pets, mounts and followers
- Followers keep pace with a mounted player. Following was budgeted a single tile of movement a turn against the rider's full allowance. (soeshii)
- Pets heal from the home campfire's ambient regen. (iso5455)
- Right-clicking a mountable creature offers Mount, so mounting is a click on the horse, the way you always tried it first. (rubberychicken)
- "within250 turns" found its missing space: the fading-pet warning now reads "within 250 turns". (theartolater)
Performance and stability
- Two renderer crashes could switch hardware acceleration off forever. Any death of the renderer process fed the counter that arms the permanent safe-GPU downgrade, so a second one in a single session wrote that downgrade to disk. Running out of memory is not evidence of a bad graphics card. Renderer deaths now stay off that counter, an automatic downgrade expires after 30 days, and the boot log names the two ways to override it. (rubberychicken)
- The performance advisory could fire because you alt-tabbed. Frame samples were only dropped while the window counted as hidden, and alt-tabbing does not hide a window, so the verdict formed while you were away, kept intact through your return, and fired on the first ordinary frame back. Unfocused samples are dropped now, every visibility and focus edge resets the sampler, and the advisory records what set it off. (datsheeptho)
- Sailing got heavier the longer you sailed. Visibility maps from water you had long since crossed were being kept for the life of the voyage. Measured on the reporter's own seed, memory growth fell from 73.4 MB per thousand steps to 24.7. (rubberychicken)
- Loading decodes the save once. It used to do it three times. (theartolater)
- Autosave's hitch is half what it was, because the save stopped rebuilding what had not changed. (theartolater)
- Veteran saves shrink. The part of the file that records the places you have changed is smaller. (theartolater)
- Autosaves now keep 60 seconds of real time between them, so fast travel cannot buy a save with every batch.
- Backups are written every fifth save instead of every save, which takes the roughly 2MB backup rewrite off the autosave path.
- A one-time pass that re-tiers 364 dungeons now runs once, as intended. It used to run on every boot.
- Two crash fixes for the visibility storm behind the blue screens, one of them the first ever recorded on a co-op client. (loukoumi, soeshii)
Reading the screen
- That giant sprite smeared across the map was a building roof, painted once per explored tile when it should have been painted once per building. It is gone. (theartolater)
- The whey font draws its background out of line of sight. (rubberychicken)
- Mining's screen shake no longer wobbles the whole frame as one flat overlay. (sksniperks)
- The night warning and the region readout have separate places to stand. (rubberychicken)
- The marker name dialog stays inside its own box. (rubberychicken)
- Hovering a buried cache works on the world map. The map ran two rumour hit tests, and only one of them knew about the retirement gate. (rubberychicken)
- The build palette advertises the right key for repair, and its shortcut keys now respect the search box. (bossman62)
Known issues
- The Terroir shrine's commitment footer can render off-screen at some window sizes.