Hello affineurs aged and fresh,
A hotfix patch for the playtest, all thanks to you.
The big one is probably for the high vision builds, where if players had high enough vision stats then monsters stopped spawning in the overworld simply because they had nowhere to "pop in" without being seen as popping in. So, that's fixed now, and so there will be hopefully no more Confused John Travolta memes in the discord chat.
Other than that, there's a hot lil lineup of bug fixes and QoL stuff. I couldn't do it without you guys. Lots of love and see you again shortly.
Tim
The world stopped being empty
- Wearing a lot of vision gear no longer empties the overworld. Creatures are placed in a ring just outside your sight so nothing ever appears in front of you — but that ring was a fixed distance while your sight was not, so once you stacked
enough vision the ring fell inside it and every placement was refused. Past roughly seven points of bonus vision, daytime spawned nothing at all: no wildlife, no hostiles, nothing, for as long as you wore the gear. The ring now moves out to
stay ahead of your eyes. - Mythic beasts stop teasing and start appearing. The rare atmospheric omens that build toward a legendary creature — the ravens before the Ravenkin Matriarch, and the rest — went silent forever the moment that beast first spawned somewhere
off in the world, which was usually before you had laid eyes on it. The omens now run until you actually see the creature. (unclejiggy) - The Legends journal no longer claims sightings you never had. A mythic that had merely spawned somewhere unseen was recorded as met, complete with a date. It now fills in when you genuinely see one. (unclejiggy)
- Monsters can fight back against soldiers. There has never been a way for wildlife to hurt a patrol, so a squad could stand next to a wolf trading blows it could not return. Field units can now be hurt and killed by the creatures they
attack. Settlement guards are deliberately left out — a town's garrison is not a hunting party. (rubberychicken) - Livestock can no longer be killed through a wall. A heavy sweeping attack reached through solid terrain in a way ordinary attacks never could. (datsheeptho)
The map and the land
- Lakes are on the world map again. The map sampled water once per hundred tiles, and most lakes are narrower than that, so they simply fell through the gaps. (rubberychicken)
- Villages no longer strand themselves in the middle of a lake. Settlement placement checked the shape of the land but not where the water was. (rubberychicken)
- Island coastlines wander instead of following the rectangle they were stamped from. (rubberychicken)
- Signposted villages no longer carpet the continent map. Every other kind of marker thinned out as you zoomed away; this one family never did, so the further out you looked the more cluttered it got. (rubberychicken)
Interface
- New players now start on the Readable font. The old pixel font is hard going over a long session, which is why the font choice exists at all. If you are already playing, nothing changes — you keep whatever you have, and Classic is
still there in Settings → Display → Font. - You are a different colour to everyone else on the minimap. Your dot was identical to every townsfolk dot. (rubberychicken)
- The sun icon and the time-of-day text agree. The icon switched to night halfway through the cycle; night actually starts later than that. (rubberychicken)
- Spell belt costs and mastery badges line up again, whatever the spell's art. (rubberychicken)
- The sleeping ZzZzZ no longer prints on top of itself at larger font sizes. (rubberychicken)
- No more health bar floating over an undamaged campfire built on a tree's stump. (rubberychicken)
Items and crafting
- Tent Kits can be pitched straight from the pack. A kit whose entire cost is the kit itself now carries its own action instead of only existing inside the build menu. Painted eggs had the same gap and got the same fix. (rubberychicken)
- Woad pots can be used. The dyeing action lived only on the garment, never on the pot you were looking at. (rubberychicken)
- Destroying species wood returns plain planks instead of deleting it, one per log. Pine, oak and the rest were the only materials where reclaiming the backpack space meant throwing the wood away. (nalathnidragon)
- Berries reach the quick bar reliably. Two checks still described food as a fixed list, and a named berry did not appear on it. (samv123)
- Wells keep "Fill all containers". The option was hidden whenever your belt was full, however empty the containers in your pack were. (datsheeptho)
- The Sailor's Hatchet is now the Sailor's Axe. It always swung as a two-handed axe; only the name said otherwise. (unknownuluguru_)
- Cold resistance is now cold weather resistance. It protects against cold conditions and never reduced cold damage — it was the one entry in that row that did not work the way the others do. (nalathnidragon)
- A crafted sealing wheel now points you at the Undermaw. Buying the wheel at a forge left you holding an endgame key with nothing on the map to use it on. (thesquirrel_74982)
Stability and performance
- Standing still costs far less. Ambient water kept the game rendering at full speed even when nothing was happening. (datsheeptho)
- Save & Quit closes the game. The process could survive it and keep running in the background. (sksniperks)
- Time no longer freezes when you go to sleep while mounted. (bossman62, rubberychicken)
- You can no longer get permanently stuck inside a ship's bulwark. Ships were the one place whose own shape could trap you and which had no rescue. (trespiratesque)
- The spore-weather colour cast stays outside the Old Mouth instead of following you in. (rubberychicken)
Credits
- The title screen art and the Roguefort wordmark are by Bladimir. I've been meaning to get him into the credits properly for a while now, so this is well overdue.
Known issues
- With a very large vision bonus — beyond about ten points, which takes deliberate stacking — daytime spawns can still thin out. Going further would mean creatures appearing within sight, and that trade is not worth it.