Roguefort Playtest · published
Roguefort Playtest - 0.13.1
I've been making so many changes to the dev build so quickly that I might have mistaken what was actually IN the main shipped build last night (for 0.13.0). Which means there's a bit more to this patch than meets the eye.
The main headlines are a perks rework thanks in large part to NalathniDragon, who has given me excellent and detailed design advice. And to ArkHaven and RubberyChicken and Aog and others as well, who've been helping to figure out which perks need changes, which are missing or have incorrect effects, etc.
The other headline is some bug fixes for farm animals and for the buried cache. Both of these issues should be resolved now - happy hunting (and feeding / petting).
**Added**
* Livestock have a Feed action on their right-click menu. It consumes the best
feed in your pack, in the order premium feed, herb mix, grain, hay, marks the
animal fed, resets its hunger clock and raises its happiness by the grade of the
feed. For the hand-fed species, the silk weaver and the hoarfrost spider, this
is the feeding route their tooltips always described and that did not exist, so
their happiness was frozen at spawn forever.
* The Attunement tab has a "Bonuses by source" view. Both halves of a level-up pay
into the same stat pool, and 47 of the 78 upgrade stat keys are also perk keys,
so the character sheet could not say where a number came from. Every bonus now
names the layer that paid it, whether guild upgrade, terroir perk or keystone,
and a test pins the attribution to the same walk the game actually pays out, so
the two can never drift apart.
**Changed**
* Charge perks that read or spend a charge you cannot generate no longer appear in
the draft. Charges start at zero and the only generation source in the game is
another perk, yet the draft offered sinks and scalers unconditionally, so 36 of
the 52 charge perks could be drafted as guaranteed-dead picks, doing nothing,
possibly forever. Sinks now require a generator you own covering every charge
they touch. Generators themselves always appear, so the road into a charge build
is unchanged and the first charge perk you see is one that starts the engine.
Nothing auto-spends.
* Four guild upgrades granted stats with no mechanic behind them, since weapon
durability, hidden traps, sleep and bleed do not exist as player-facing systems, and were part of older ideas that Tim had either shelved or abandoned for now, or forgot about.
Each is rewired in place rather than removed, so existing stacks convert instead
of evaporating: Smith's Eye grants crit damage, Runesight night vision, Tides
Within healing while resting, Keelhauled damage reduction below half health.
* Around sixty picks whose entire payout was a single-digit percentage were
rescaled: per-stack value up, max stacks down, ceiling identical. An existing
character's totals do not move, because the bonus sum clamps saved stacks to the
new cap, but a single new pick is now large enough to feel. Boolean stats, being
armor against magic, beast indifference, the creature compass and lifesteal
overflow, drop to one stack, since stacks past the first were wholly wasted
picks.
* Mother Rind and Grand Curdmaker were mythic in weight and common in payout, flat
single-digit bundles at 3-in-100 draw odds, so the letdown was memorable. Both
now anchor a build: Mother Rind scales max health with the armor perks you carry,
and Grand Curdmaker makes consumables hit a quarter harder with one use in six
free.
* The two halves of a level-up now play by one rulebook. Only the perk half could
reroll; the guild-upgrade half could not, for no articulated reason. Both now
reroll for gold on the same per-level cost ladder, sharing one counter. Each
phase names itself and its rules where you pick, meaning which layer you are
drafting from, what it stacks toward and how its rarities unlock, and the five
region-conditioned perks carry a "regional" ribbon so they stop reading as a
third perk system that does not exist.
* Treasure maps now point at buried caches about twice as often as at wonders,
which is the weighting the code always claimed and never applied.
**Fixed**
* Buried caches could not be found, and half of finding one did not work. The Dig
action was gated on standing next to the tile but not on it, which is exactly
where the map's X leads you, so standing on a cache offered nothing and the
keyboard interact opened an empty menu. Roughly one cache per world also landed
on water and could never be dug. Dig now works from on the tile, from an adjacent
tile, from the keyboard interact and in first person; caches stamped on water
move to the nearest dry tile; and a signpost can no longer overwrite a cache
marker. Finding one is also signposted now: a proximity cue as you close in, a
loose-earth message and an X marker on the tile itself, a study message that
names the island, a map X that clears once you have dug, and honest tooltip,
legend and help text.
* Livestock starved beside a full trough, and some never ate at all. The feeding
tick measured trough distance, grazing and starvation against the animal's stored
record rather than where the animal was standing, and only the on-screen copy ever
moved. A cow bought from a vendor kept its record at the vendor's tile forever and
so never reached the trough at home, a goat whose record sat on grass grazed
permanently and read as Fed without ever being fed, and one whose record sat on a
road starved next to a full trough. Records now take their position from the live
animal every overworld turn.
* The rest of the feeding system came with it. The hunger check is now per animal
rather than a shared 100-turn boundary, so turns spent in a dungeon, a city or on
a ship no longer make a check vanish or latch an animal as Fed forever. Hunger
accrues real elapsed time, capped per check so a long absence leaves the herd
hungry rather than suddenly dead. Starvation warnings fire on the threshold
crossing instead of inside a window, so an irregular cadence cannot skip them.
Older saved animals missing a field no longer become immortal and permanently
Unfed. A demolished trough stops feeding the herd. And the farmhand now finds
troughs by the tile itself rather than only ones you had filled by hand, so
village troughs and freshly built ones finally get topped up.
* A full trough drew the empty sprite, which is what made a stocked trough look
like the animals were ignoring it. The sprite read the trough's contents from one
store while every writer, being the bump fill, the right-click fill, the farmhand
and the eat write-back, wrote another, and in the overworld the wrong one always
won. Three of the four painted trough sprites were unreachable. Building a trough
now also seeds its contents so every reader sees it from turn one.
* The look tooltip on livestock no longer reads "Unfed" on a healthy hand-fed
animal, and lists the species' real yields instead of "Milk: undefinedt" on
animals that have no milk timer.
* A companion named Ghost came back from a save as Pale Drifter. The load-time name
refresh walked every creature in the save with no check that it was a wild
creature, so a companion whose name matched a species word was mistyped as that
species and renamed to the lexicon's version of it. Individually named units,
meaning companions, party members, livestock and townsfolk, are now exempt, and
the exemption is derived from the game's own idea of which units are yours, so a
new kind of ally is exempt automatically.
* In co-op, a joiner could not open the livestock menu at all, and every livestock
action a joiner did take reverted. The menu was gated on data the host does not
send, so it never opened; and pet, milk, shear, egg collection, feeding and
trough filling all wrote only to the joiner's own machine, so yields appeared in
the pack and then vanished on the next update from the host, and a trough the
joiner filled diverged permanently. All of it now runs through the host, which
checks adjacency against the acting player, ownership, whether the animal is
ready and what is actually in that player's pack, spends the turn once, and
sends the result back to the right player. Feeding or filling with nothing in the
pack now refuses without costing a turn. Trough contents are also synced, so a
trough the host filled no longer renders empty on the joiner, including for
someone who joins later.
* Swiftfoot, Fleet of Foot and Overlander bought literally nothing until the fourth
stack, at +5 points per pick against the 20-point-per-tile threshold, the same bug
class as the original Road Runner. Each is now one pick, one whole tile. An old
save holding four part-stacks keeps the +1 tile it already had. A new tripwire also
walks every perk and upgrade in the game and refuses any that grants a stat key
with no real consumer, so the next dead pick cannot ship silently.
* Poison, burn and knockback resists now actually resist. Every damage-over-time
effect in the game ticks for exactly 1 damage, and the percentage reduction floored
at 1, so every value of poison resist, from 8% to 99%, produced identical output,
and the stat had never done anything. Resists now bank the fractional reduction
between ticks and skip whole ticks instead: 40% poison resist skips 2 ticks in 5.
Fire resist rides the same mechanism on burning, its first consumer that is not
vampire-only, and knockback resist rolls to negate knockback where knockback
actually lands. Cold resist's vision leg now rounds in your favour, so 8% visibly
softens a blizzard. Tooltips across the resist family now say what the stats
actually touch, including the armor curve that was described as flat subtraction.
* Sickness ticks are now thinned by status resistance, the last 1-damage tick that
ignored every resist. Same banked-percentage mechanism as poison and burn: 40%
status resistance skips two ticks in five, and the resist that decides whether
sickness lands now also softens it once it has.
* Cold resistance no longer grants full blizzard immunity from a single small perk.
The turn gate compared an integer step counter against a fractional speed, which
rounded every fraction up: one 5% cold perk behaved exactly like 100% immunity,
stacks two through five bought nothing, and snow's smaller penalty rounded away for
everyone, always. The gate now banks fractions between turns, the same mechanism
the resist ticks use, so cold resistance pays exactly its percentage, stacks
matter, snow genuinely and gently slows you for the first time, and the Speed
readout shows the honest average, such as 2.05, instead of a rounded-up whole
number. For characters who were getting the full refund from one perk this is a
real reduction; it is also the truth the card was always telling.
* Charge perks no longer stack to five. A gap between the stacking rule's
documentation and its code let every charge perk stack five times, and threshold
payouts multiply per stack, so five copies of The Settled Vein paid 250% worth of
raw damage-reduction points off one threshold, five times its designed 50. All
charge perks now cap at one stack: each is one pick, and a charge build goes broad
instead of tall. Saved characters holding extra stacks read and act as one, with no
migration and nothing deleted.
* "+1% chance to upgrade dropped item rarity" now upgrades dropped item rarity. The
stat was implemented as a chance to raise the rarity floor before the roll, and on
any drop without a floor, which is every overworld, creature and site drop, the
raised floor computed to COMMON, the exact default. Every point of the stat, from
Uncommon Eye's 1% to the full 75 reachable across the pool, bought nothing outside
two boss-chest paths. On a successful roll the dropped item's rarity is now
promoted one tier, on every path, within the area's existing rarity limits.
* The rescale's last stragglers moved. Uncommon Eye and Lucky Finger go to +2% per
pick at two stacks, now that the rarity-upgrade stat they grant actually works.
Four rares that granted less per pick than their own rescaled uncommon siblings,
being Executioner, Fortified Will, Unliving and Grave Robber, take the same
values-up, caps-down treatment. Three rares that stacked on-or-off stats up to five
times, being Pungent Aura, Predator Aura and Master Tracker, drop to one stack with
their live stats raised to keep their ceilings. Existing characters keep their
totals.. picks past a lowered cap count at the cap.
* The Inventory panel showed a speed the game does not give you, such as "SPD 2.08x".
It received the raw fractional value while the top bar deliberately rounded. Both
readouts now agree.
**Known issues**
* Ten perks still have no painted art and show their glyph instead. That's ok for playtesting I guess - the sprites are being made right now by Bladimir (pixel art who was commissioned).
* Flat elemental damage negation is still not in the game. The perks that would read
it are deferred rather than shipped half-working, and will land with the content
that carries typed damage.
* Everything under Known Issues in the 0.13.0 notes still applies, and some stuff before that too.