Hey everyone,
Like I say in every update, I'd like to say a big thank you to you, the community. All your bug reports, suggestions, and threads have made it possible to keep improving the game and making it more enjoyable and accessible to play.
First up, there are OVER 100 NEW SPRITES from the amazingly talented pixel art team on Discord - that's @ArkHaven @MerlinTheQuestioner and @DatSheepDoe, as well as @shu @Briarios @ElfieTheExplorer and @Klaisen 👏.
This is another chocker block update, with a colossal number of fixes and new content, including notably the addition of farmable, tameable, and rideable HAMSTERS (thanks @thesquirrel for this suggestion).
Before I jump into the patch ntoes, I'd like to thank all the playtesters who've contributed over the past week or so, including:
@rubberychicken, @theartolater, @urughak, @datsheeptho, @arkhaven, @samv123, @nalathnidragon, @bossman62, @em8595, @sarcen, @thesquirrel_74982, @unknownuluguru_, @elfietheesp55, @onixdark, @aj01657, @avocado8716, @hurrimcdurr, Anticus, @trespiratesque, @_herrschneider, @larius_the_second, @mstephans, @briarios, @dodqoonpooka, @ellis_cake, @hariel, @izianee, @jungcodex, @mrmac23, @raycerzdisword, @shizznitskii, @shurizzler, @tstalkerzero, @unclejiggy, @yah3699, 8-bit, Dr_Bicinium, and Martha Pepper
Let's get to it - the patch notes below is a summarised list, as there's actually much more detail that I could go into in the space permitted here. If you want the full detail I will try to post it on Discord in the #patch-notes channel, if character count limits permit.
Thanks and see you again in the next update.
Tim
Speed and travel
- Speed actually gives you distance again. Moving fast now covers ground instead of making the world take extra turns around you, so a road saves time rather than costing it. Long journeys over roads now use about 20% less daylight than walking straight there.
- Sixteen world systems (weather, spawns, hunger, cheese aging, cooldowns and more) were running at double or quadruple rate on a road. They all run at world pace now.
- Auto-travel is far less likely to strand you. It resumes after a brake, refuses to path through tiles that teleport you, approaches walled-in destinations properly, and stops saying "no unexplored areas" with half a floor left.
- You can right-click distant NPCs to walk over and talk, click-path onto explored-but-unseen ground, and follow townspeople or party members around.
Combat feel
- Attacks connect at the start of the swing instead of after a wind-up. Every player strike, mine and chop is roughly four times faster to contact, with a brief freeze and a white flash on impact and a small camera push into the blow. Enemies keep their slower telegraph.
- Three melee stances for multi-tile violence goodness: Cleave for dual wield, Sweep for two-handers, Shield Bash for weapon and shield. A polearm family of four reach weapons was added.
- A pile of combat rules that had been doing nothing now work: ranged attacks can hit any part of a large creature, adjacent enemies can always see you, blinded enemies still swing, damage-over-time and zone kills count as kills, and floating damage numbers show the real post-armour figure.
Spells
- Spell combos were firing a message and changing nothing. They now consume their ingredients, leave a visible residue you can build on, state their mechanical effect next to the flavour text, chain into each other, and scale with your level.
- Spell sequences: cast one family then another within three turns and the second cast carries an extra effect. Eight pairs, plus two three-cast Grand Sequences.
- Spells can chain between targets, with a new affinage branch (FILATA), three shrine grafts, eight perks, a fifth charge type and two new spells built around it.
- Status effects consolidated from 16 to 11, each with one clear meaning, so "blistered" and "melted" stop being the same thing under two names.
Perks and progression
- Four opener perks that generate and spend their own charge, so the first pick on a charge branch is never dead.
- Stacking "expend all" perks now stack properly instead of the first one draining the pool. Payouts roughly double or triple.
- Once every Affinage Art is learned, surplus Insight distils into perk reroll tokens rather than piling up dead.
- Several perks that were doing nothing at all now work, including Rooted Bloom's regen and the free-turn perks, whose cards were also overstating what they give.
New things to own, build and do
- Tents you can camp in, docks to launch from, wire fences, tree farms, storerooms, pethouses and terrariums.
- Marble golem workers who never eat, sleep, quit or ask for wages.
- Seed pouches that hold 100 kinds of seed outside your pack.
- HAMSTERS!!!! Hamsters that can be tamed, bred, farmed and mounted as a form of transport.
- Armour dyes, four spell teas, the Slipcurd escape charm, the Waywheel travel charm, and a cottage you can fund in a town so someone moves in.
The world
- Roads stop dead-ending into buildings. Town and village streets are clear, city walls have gates where roads cross them, and roads between settlements route around water.
- Villages have layouts again. 119 of 207 villages are now street villages where the layout system had been blind to their roads. 946 signposts stamp into the world.
- Inns are inns. 173 of 268 had no furniture and none had an innkeeper.
- Village shops differ from each other, each with a seeded specialty. Top-tier vendors stock real top-tier goods. Roads carry travelling merchants, caravan hands and adventurers.
- The Undermaw was rebuilt to match its guidebook entry, with named bands, an underground river, a new enemy and reworked loot.
- Cheese caves were all sealed inside solid rock. They have entrances now.
- You can no longer spawn walled into your own starting camp, which was happening on about one start in five.
- A new cult shrine POI and comet impacts that leave a real crater you you can find.
Story and quests
- The main story had some gaps in item spawns required to complete certain pathways in it - bugs are fixed now.
- Thymerock and Fennmarche characters were being sent on another faction's story. They now report to their own leaders.
- Killing a guard by accident no longer locks you out of the main story. There is a weregild writ on the notice board to pay off the debt.
- Quest text describes what the game checks, names ingredients consistently, and stops promising quests from villagers who have none.
Creatures and companions
- You can tame certain animals and ride them as mounts, and it shows the mounts properly now! Including, yes, hamsters.
- Foxes and rabbits had barely spawned anywhere since 20 July, which also blocked their pelts, two recipes, two trophies and two companions.
- Docile animals can no longer be one-shot by an accidental bump.
- Companion cap is now a ladder of 4, 5 and 6. Frail pets are born non-combat and any pet can be told to stay out of fights.
- Pets stopped healing short of full, stayed pets teleported to you, and phasing enemies followed you upstars. All fixed.
Co-op
- Peer identity on Steam is verified by the platform, closing a route where a modified client could rewrite everyone else's world.
- Pings on the minimap and world map, convoy travel by following a party member, and riding as a passenger on someone else's boat.
- Joiners can tame and befriend animals, buy biome-gated stock, and recast perks at the bench. All three previously did nothing or did it locally and lost it.
Interface
- HUD text now uses one size ladder instead of fifteen ad-hoc sizes, panel tabs hold one row at every font size, and the spell belt obeys the font setting at all.
- Widgets stay where you put them through a resize, resize on each axis, and no longer overlap the dungeon buttons.
- The dungeon "% cleared" figure is exact and stops resetting when you revisit floors. The Undermaw stops reading "Easy".
- Better readouts: real creature intent on look, a day and moon-phase arc, split midnight watches, item hover cards in every container, known-book marks, stolen-goods chips, and a settlement's next reputation tier.
- Movement animation is four separate settings (you, enemies, townsfolk, companions), each Hop, Slide or Instant. By default you glide and the world hops.
Performance and saves
- The AFK freeze is fixed. Three separate causes in the frame loop.
- Save files were up to 77% wasted space, because generated tree health was being stored as player damage. An 8.6 MB save drops to 1.96 MB, and the same mistake was making the game regenerate chunks you were standing on.
- Walking was scrolling the world for 100ms then standing still for the rest of every step. The camera now keeps up.
- Renderer work across 2D, 2.5D and 3D: fewer objects, fewer shader rebuilds, cached terrain and colour work.
- Explored map is stored as its real structure, so squares of map no longer reveal themselves. A dungeon run is no longer forgotten because you stopped at an inn on the way home.
Economy and consequences
- Gold from killing monsters nerfed a bit at low tiers, gear-bench prices escalating with use, boat repair priced by tier, stable retrieval fees, and portal-hub vendors closed until a town knows your name.
- Reputation grinding in one town per day pays diminishing returns, statue thresholds tripled, and killing village livestock costs standing.
- Theft systems that were not firing now fire: witnesses react, lockpicking gets you hunted, pickpocketing turns victims hostile, and the last container that stole without asking now asks.
- Early raids harass rather than raze, with grace lasting until night 10 or your tenth structure.
Controls and accessibility
- Keys and gamepad buttons can be unbound.
- Non-US keyboard layouts get their quick slots back.
- A parked HOTAS throttle no longer scrolls every menu to the bottom, and there is a master switch to turn controller input off entirely.
- Book background animation can be turned off, and honours the system reduced-motion setting.
- Linux gets a safe-GPU mode with self-healing relaunch after a graphics crash.
Known issues
- Squares of falsely revealed map already baked into an existing save cannot be told from real explored ground and will stay.
- Settlements you have already visited keep their empty inns and old street layouts. New ones get the fixes.
- Environmental damage, damage over time and starvation bypass temporary HP.
- Glacier Spike misses at range 2.
- Melee stance, tea, floor cap and auction numbers are a first pass and please expect some retuning as we see hwo these play out.