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Roguefort Playtest 0.13.0 - Release Notes: "Sweet Lil Sporeling"

Roguefort Playtest · published

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Roguefort Playtest v0.13.0

Hello Roguefort playtest crew! Today's patch is a very bug-squashing and QoL focussed one.

I'm kinda in awe of the scale and the detail of the reports you've all sent in, and to honour that I decided to go as hard as I could to get through as much as possible. So what follows is a fairly hefty slew of new features, bug fixes, and changes.

Where applicable I've added credit for each report or suggestion at the end of each item. If I've missed anyone or anything, I'm sorry! Just let me know in Discord if that's the case.

Thanks everyone. Have a great night or day, and see you in the Old Mouth.

ADDED

  • The 2D view zooms. Scroll wheel, or '-' and '=' on the keyboard, scales the grid between 0.5x and 1.25x. Zooming out widens the viewport (31 to 41 columns across two steps), which matters for long-ranged spells that previously out-ranged what you could see. The setting persists. 2.5D and first-person decline it — Draw Distance owns depth there. (I can't recall who suggested this — I'm so sorry!)
  • Perk tags (, , , and 26 others) are now shown on the perk cards where you pick perks, on the character sheet and in the Terroir codex. 26 perks scale off another perk's tags, and the only place tags appeared before was a character-sheet hover tooltip. Each tag also has a written meaning, with a "Counted by:" list derived from the perk data, plus a legend at the foot of the codex and a section in the help manual. — NalathniDragon
  • Every perk stat label — all 88 of them — now explains itself on hover, and in the detail pane for keyboard and gamepad. The text is derived from where the stat is actually read, so the vision/night-vision split, the 20-point road and terrain speed threshold, flat swim tiles and discount-versus-price all say what they really do. Six stats whose mechanics do not exist yet now say so instead of promising a payout. — NalathniDragon
  • You can rename your character in Settings → Gameplay during a run. The rename carries the whole online identity with it: the mail directory in The Old Mouth re-declares the new name on the open connection, mail addressed to your old name still reaches you via the postal tag, co-op tells the host, and a legacy save whose hub identity was keyed off the name is migrated so the mailbox, vault, auction proceeds and gold ledger are not orphaned. Records already written — letters in flight, auction listings, donor lines, statue inscriptions, chronicle entries — keep the old name on purpose. — Elfie
  • Arming a damaging spell puts the targeting cursor on the nearest visible enemy it can actually hit, line-of-sight checked, instead of the tile you last walked toward. No enemy in reach falls back to the old facing-direction placement. — Aog
  • Take Wing has a Companion Panel button. It was the one companion order with no panel route. — SamV
  • The credits modal now names the icon and tileset licenses: the twelve game-icons.net contributors whose work ships as the perk, upgrade and discipline icons, CC BY 3.0 by name with its link, a note that the icons are recolored derivatives, and the Phosphor tileset's CC BY-SA 4.0 alongside the existing Loren Schmidt sprite credit. — NalathniDragon

CHANGED

  • Large chest capacity goes from 8 slots to 20, at the same cost. The bookshelf strictly dominated it — 16 slots for less of every resource — and the rumoured bookshelf downside (contents invisible to the crafting table) turned out not to exist. The bookshelf keeps its 16 slots and now costs 10 wood, 3 stone, 5 gold, and asks for confirmation like other expensive builds. — Aog, ArkHaven
  • Road Runner and Lightfoot now grant 20 points per pick instead of 1 and 5. Road and terrain speed are threshold stats — one full tile per 20 points, remainder discarded — so the old values were unreachable even at max stacks. One pick now visibly adds a tile of speed. Max stacks is 2. Tide-Runner's swim label drops a '%' it never had; the stat is flat tiles per turn. — NalathniDragon
  • Wayfarer's Whey will not fold space while a hostile is in sight. It was cheap, market-replenishable and usable mid-fight to cancel any death. Out of combat it is unchanged, and its description now says so. All routes are gated, including the quick-slot hotkey. — tee
  • Guards no longer offer both "Attack" and "Provoke". Provoke flipped the settlement hostile, which Attack already does, but skipped the damage, the confirmation, the faction reputation hit and the crime-ledger entry — choosing it cost you the fight and bought nothing. It is gone. Attack is the one aggressive verb on a guard and carries every consequence it always did. — SamV
  • A base built inside a village, town or city footprint (plus the 5-tile build buffer) is now immune to night raids, like the cosy hearth around the world origin. Raid spawns are measured outward from your homestead, which is meaningless inside a settlement 48 to 400 tiles across, so war bands were materialising on the market square. Earning the standing to build in a town now buys peace at night. — RubberyChicken
  • Raiders can no longer destroy a settlement's own structures. The raid target set was built by scanning tiles in a 30-tile box around your base with no owner check, so pitching a base near a village put that village's walls, doors, beds and stoves on the raid menu and deleted them permanently, at no reputation cost. Only structures the player actually built there are targetable now. — thesquirrel
  • Creature spawn distance is now derived from your view radius rather than a fixed 8-12 tiles. That constant was set when the view radius was 10; it later went to 28 and the spawn ring never moved, so 100% of daytime spawns appeared inside the rendered viewport and 56.6% could aggro on their own spawn turn. Spawns are now 30-34 tiles by day and 20-26 at night. Creatures spawned far out walk toward you until they can sense you themselves, so the overworld does not go empty; despawn distance rises to 56 to match. Measured: daytime pop-in-view 100% to 0%, spawn-turn aggro 56.6% to 0%, median warning before contact 7 to 16 turns, encounter rate 26.9 to 21.4 per 1000 turns by day and 111.8 to 100.3 at night. — RubberyChicken
  • Night-only creatures no longer spawn from daytime pools. The fungal horror was weighted 20 in the abyssal day table, so it spawned at noon, was immediately marked as retreating, fired the dawn-retreat banner and fled, every ~25 turns. — thesquirrel
  • The recipe book names the one spell a war-cheese wheel actually produces instead of advertising the whole family and tier pool with a "(random)" note. Production has been deterministic per recipe for some time; pressing the same wheel three times looked like a triple RNG failure when it was the pinned output working as designed. — NalathniDragon
  • Cone and beam spells now carry a minimum range. Both bail on a zero-length heading, so aiming at your own tile spent Manna, a cooldown and a turn to hit nothing. The cursor now paints invalid there, and cannot open on the caster from a saved facing. Point-centred shapes are unaffected. — NalathniDragon
  • 2.5D and first-person draw calls are down 29-43%. The cost was per-draw CPU, not fill rate, so strong GPUs did not help. Walls burned six draw calls to paint three materials and rebuilt their geometry several times a second while moving; the 2D animation engine built and discarded a full cell array every 3D frame; shader error checking was left on in production. Measured: 776 to 466 draw calls in 2.5D medium, 745 to 423 in first-person medium, 1359 to 855 in first-person ultra, with identical triangle counts and structurally identical screenshots. — T-StalkerZero
  • Named island dungeons respect beginner spawn tiers. They were tiered by their island's authored danger level with no idea a starting village stood there, so about a quarter of Brinehold runs began 51 tiles from a tier-3 Leviathan Pit. Named dungeons near a low-tier village are now capped using the same beginner radii the procedural dungeons already used. Four of 325 dungeons were affected; the far archipelago keeps its teeth.
  • Every highway into a walled city now earns a gate. The site analysis asked the road index one question — the tangent at the city centre — and walled off every other approach: 18 to 24 blind wall hits across 29 walled settlements, 9 of 10 cities. Gates are now placed where each road actually crosses the wall, with cardinal fill-ins for cities. On the world map, unvisited settlements in a discovered region draw a small anonymous ring, so a road no longer appears to run to nothing — the destinations were always real, the map just did not mark them until you had been there.
  • Bridges and causeways have clear approaches. Buildings are painted after streets and the landmark placer had no lane guard, so any building beside a crossing could wall off its only ramp — Saltrake's causeway ended at the smithy's east wall. Notice boards corked ramps the same way on 6 of 20 seeds, and the market stone stood on a causeway deck or in open surf in 9 settlements.
  • Wilderness roads report their real class again. The road tile variant was repurposed as a surface channel, so every dirt road including footpaths reported as a major road, cobbled boulevards reported as minor, and about 25% of cobble tiles got no road bonus at all. Player-facing: minor roads go from speed 3 to 2, village footpaths from 3 to 1, cobbled boulevards uniformly 2, majors unchanged.
  • Travel Here follows roads. Within 50 tiles the pathfinder treated a paved highway like swamp, and beyond that it aimed a straight ray, so a road 80 tiles off-axis was invisible. Long travel now plans a route over the actual road network — village connectors included — and only uses it when it beats the direct line. Measured deviation from the road on bend fixtures: about 1 tile, against about 30 before. Cross-water trips keep the old behaviour. — NalathniDragon
  • Boat items use their own painted sprites. Every boat resolved to one generic icon, so the six per-tier boat sprites — registered, paintable, with accepted community art already in the game — were never looked up by anything. — ArkHaven
  • Mounts and pack animals each get their own inventory icon. All seven types shared one, and per-type art would have been unreachable the same way the boats were. Existing saved mounts need no migration.
  • Marketplace stones and player waystones are now off-limits to NPCs and wandering creatures. The market stone is a settlement's one portal into The Old Mouth and sat in the open on the town square, which is prime loitering ground. The waystone is the landing pad for fast travel and there was no occupancy check on arrival, so travelling home could drop you on top of whatever was standing there. Both stay player-walkable. — RubberyChicken

FIXED

  • Escape during the perk half of a terroir level-up destroyed the perk. The level-up was spent the moment the upgrade committed, and the global Escape handler closed the panel over the modal's own guard. With two or more picks banked there was not even an error — the next level-up filled the newest row and the older one stayed empty forever. What you are owed is now derived from your allocation record rather than tracked separately, so it cannot drift, it rides in the save, and it cannot be repaid twice. Saves already bitten are repaid — the open rows are the record — and you get a once-per-session notice plus counts on the HUD and character sheet. Two more of the same: the Pickled keystone could be granted without its element, leaving a capstone worth four picks doing nothing silently and forever, and the Angelica chapter counter advanced when the panel opened, so escaping consumed chapters nobody read.
  • Clicking a spell while in look mode produced both states at once: LOOK MODE and CAST banners painting over each other, arrows steering the look cursor, and confirm casting at a stale aim cursor. The keyboard entries guarded each other; the mouse paths did not. — NalathniDragon
  • "The the Wyvern yields Wyvern Rennet", and about twenty siblings. The creature label already includes the article, and call sites added another. Authored names carry their own — every roaming-boss kill read "The The Hollow Hart falls at last." — NalathniDragon
  • The attunement panel had no height cap and grew off the bottom of the screen. At Hyperlegible on 1280x800 the Reroll button sat about 23px below the fold, and at large font size it overflowed in every typeface. Keyboard and gamepad users had no recovery, since scrolling the overlay needed a mouse wheel. The middle now scrolls and the footer stays pinned. — NalathniDragon
  • Black Rind ("your damage-over-time statuses tick +1 damage per stack") only applied to spells tagged as damage-over-time. Ignition burning is deliberately not tagged that way, so igniting spells, fire arrows and burning ground all kept ticking a flat 2 with the skill learned. It now rides every status you inflict, across all ~17 application sites. Fire damage to the player is untouched — the skill is offensive. — NalathniDragon
  • Feeding a Mountain Goat cooked venison turned it into a Mountain Lynx. Several tame targets were authored off the biome rather than the animal. All 23 pairs were audited: the Mountain Lynx now tames from the wild Snow Leopard, the goat befriends into a milkable Dairy Goat, and the Sand Jackal tames from the wild sand jackal, which previously tamed into nothing. Four cross-family pairs need new wild creatures and are listed under Known Issues. Also: milk-only befriendable animals announced "A Silk Weaver has joined your animals", and the codex printed "Cannot be tamed." for every befriendable animal. — NalathniDragon
  • Loading a save rewrote every un-turned-in quest of any type into the tutorial's first send-off — "Loose your Cheddar Shot" — because the tutorial migration had no check that a quest was actually a tutorial quest. Requirements were untouched, so the quest still worked; only the text was wrong. The migration is now gated, and because descriptions are stored rather than generated, bitten saves are repaired: the sentence is rebuilt from the surviving requirement fields, across 16 quest types. A dry run on the reporting save repaired all 32 damaged quests with none left blank. — ArkHaven
  • Screen-edge partial tiles showed a duplicate of the outermost row and column rather than the world beyond it. The 2D grid now renders a one-tile overscan ring of real terrain, entities included, at the letterboxed edges. Reported in fullscreen. — NalathniDragon
  • Corrupt water tiles spread through saved worlds and never healed — the "River Curse". Any unmapped tile written through the tile setter stored the ocean sentinel value, which renders as water and, being marked player-modified, survived every save forever: the usual repairs skip player tiles, and frozen chunks skip repairs entirely. Rain writes no tiles anywhere; the correlation with sleeping was the sleep bursts. The tile setter now refuses the sentinel, and loading heals every occurrence in modified chunks and patches the frozen snapshot at the same positions — 28 tiles healed in the reporting save. Three related fixes: burnt reeds only char down to shallow water next to existing water, so an isolated reed in a homestead cannot conjure a permanent water tile; a floor-only half of a house straddling a chunk boundary now freezes instead of re-rolling pond noise; and magic-find drops no longer materialise beside your bed while you sleep. — dreugeworst
  • Wheels of War has been unreachable since 26 July. Four names the code used were never imported, so both entry points — the tavern NPC and the settlement NPC — threw a runtime error on click before the game screen was reached. Nothing caught it: nothing imports the main game component in tests, so an unresolved name is invisible to both the build and the test suite. A new check now runs the project's linter over the entry components no test imports.
  • The Grand Reserve wheel never carried your name. The player object has no name field — it is written in two places and neither sets one — so every Grand Reserve ever collected was chalked "the Affineur's Reserve", though the discovery text promises a wheel carrying your own name. The feature had never once fired. Two other readers of the same field were also always falling back: the Corvax near-miss note, which exists to address you personally, and a ledger prop that was never used. The trophy read is co-op correct — it names the acting player, not the host. Already-granted trophies keep the name they were given.
  • The world map was a snapshot of exploration rather than a live view of it. Set a long autotravel, start it, open the map: your icon walks out into unbroken black and only closing and reopening filled the ground in. The fog was computed once and never recomputed, while everything passed as a prop kept updating — which is exactly why the marker moved over dark ground. Fog now folds in newly explored chunks incrementally and repaints only the affected block, so it updates live without tearing down the renderer. Standing still with the map open costs nothing. — RubberyChicken
  • Your minions could beat a sleeping creature to death without waking it. Every condition in the wake check was measured against the player, so nothing an ally did could satisfy any of them — a sleeper went from 60 HP to 16 without opening an eye. The struck victim now wakes at the strike, and the noise of the clash stirs sleepers near the fight even when it is nowhere near you. Party allies had the same hole. Three more from the same report: companion and summon kills paid gold and experience and then went silent, because no drop table was ever rolled and no line reached the log, so a summon build's kills read as yielding nothing; walking into your own summon attacked it instead of swapping places; and "Whey Sprite attacks the The Sour-Touched" doubled the article. Also found: a summon that stepped into a doorway was silently deleted. — RubberyChicken
  • Auto-move kept walking a path the fight had left behind. A bump onto a creature swings rather than steps, but the stepper retired the head of the path anyway, so every hit of a multi-hit kill slid the path a tile further ahead of a player who had not moved. Once the fight ended the game re-pathed correctly and the stepper immediately overwrote it with the stale one, every 80ms, logging "Moving... (N steps)" while you stood still. On a click-to-move the trip died where you stood; on a world-map trip the next leg could not start until the dead one drained — measured at 4.4 to 6.1 seconds. You now keep swinging until the target dies and step onto the tile the moment it clears, with a cap of 30 swings so an unkillable blocker cannot lock you into unattended combat. The co-op equivalent, where a joiner could be stranded mid-trip by a swing, is fixed too. — RubberyChicken
  • Your ship vanished when you changed render mode. Sailing on deep water and swapping between 2D and 2.5D or first-person left you drawn as a bare @ on open sea until the next sailing step. The 2D boat overlay lived only on the drawing engine, and each render mode builds its own — so every switch destroyed the state, and nothing re-seeded it. The overlay is now derived once and fed to both renderers. — RubberyChicken
  • Phase Step could never point at the wall it exists to cross. The keystone used your last successful step, so the one direction it is for — the blocked one — was unreachable: bumping a wall recorded nothing and the blink went along your last real step instead. Bump the wall or click it, then phase. The description also said 1 tile; it moves 2. — RubberyChicken
  • Signposts in Roquelle did nothing when bumped, and the market sign gave every bearing from an anchor 7 tiles away — "S - the Market (0 tiles)". Decorative craft-ward signs were being painted as real wayfinding posts with no data behind them; 6 dead posts in Roquelle alone. A census also found 14 of about 90 settlements with an invisible gate sign, where the data was laid on masonry or water. Dressing signs now carry real directions, bearings are measured from where the post actually stands, drowned posts relocate, and a post from an old save with no data behind it gives a weathered-sign line rather than silence. — RubberyChicken
  • A signpost could seal a one-tile alley. The placement guard only refused a cell whose loss cut the settlement in two — and an alley severs nothing, since the two ends still meet twenty tiles later around the block. A census found one corked passage in 54 of the world's 159 settlements. A sign may now never plug a one-tile passage and must leave every neighbour a way round of six cardinal steps or fewer. 92.5% of shops still carry a door sign, down from 96.0%; the rest keep their on-entry banner.
  • "You pick up speed on the road." fired on open tundra with no road in sight. The speed change was real, the message was a lie: speed folds roads, mounts, perks, weather and deep snow into one number, and any increase was announced as a road. The actual cause was the deep-snow penalty flicking off — a summer tundra sits right on the threshold, with a shallow drift every ~90 tiles, so a rider crossed one twice a minute. The message now names its real cause, with its own wording for wading into and out of deep snow, and an honest bare "You pick up speed." for anything else. — RubberyChicken
  • Townsfolk died of thirst for no apparent reason. The drink errand had one venue — open water within 30 tiles — and gave up silently when it missed. Measured over real cities: 61% of a large city's walkable ground has no well within 30 tiles, and 37% has no water of any kind, so anyone anchored in a tenement ward drained to death. Villages were fine, which is why nothing caught it. Drinking now has the same fallback chain eating does, ending at the household water stores at the doorstep of a building the NPC belongs to. A second trap: the livestock trough sits in a fenced pound whose only gate creatures cannot walk through, so the pen interior is a sealed island — the walker wedged at the fence and re-picked the same trough until the meter ran out. Stand tiles on sealed islands are now refused. Mineral springs count as drinkable, and a genuinely unreachable water source now prints a visible complaint so any remaining death has a reason.
  • Water containers stopped telling you how to refill them. Narrowing drink, refill and purify to the equipped belt container removed the buttons everywhere else silently: backpack pouches showed no verbs at all, the belt row's Refill vanished entirely when you were not next to water instead of greying out, the r and p hotkeys could not reach the belt, and wells did not count as water even though the tile-side Fill row happily fills there. Unavailable verbs are now greyed with their reason, the hotkeys fall back to the belt, backpack containers show an "equip to your belt" hint, and refill takes the best adjacent source (a well beats the ocean). — thesquirrel
  • Decorative mushrooms in dungeons drew named-species art. The variant is picked by position hash across the full variant list, and those lists have grown bespoke species art past their generic entries — 33 deep for mushrooms, of which only the first 7 are plain — so 78% of decorative dungeon mushrooms drew something like a Forest Acorn or Riftspore while inspecting as plain "Mushroom". Bushes, grass and flowers had the same problem. Real dungeon flora now names itself properly too, so Cave Moss and Starcap read as themselves. Separately, the four nut items shared the mushroom tile character and drew the painted mushroom icon; each now has its own. (It is not a creature. There is no acorn mimic.) — thesquirrel
  • The dawn-retreat banner fired at eleven in the morning. It was triggered by the presence of any night creature in daylight rather than by the transition, and the day pools could mint those endlessly. It is now tied to the actual night-to-day boundary, and surfacing from a dungeon at midday no longer announces a false sunrise. A retreating night creature also actually retreats now — it kept marching toward the player for up to 45 actions. — thesquirrel
  • Perks with no painted art showed an empty framed box. Ten perks added since the last art pass, Rendered Tithe among them, had a glyph all along and nothing read it. Cards now fall back to the perk's glyph on a tonal plate in the rarity colour. Rendered Tithe's glyph was also wrong — it grants Manna on kill and shipped with the generic sparkle. The ten remain unpainted. — SamV
  • The C interact key could not reach your own companions. The scan searched only the wild-creature list, and companions are never in it, so the menu you get from a right-click was unreachable by keyboard and gamepad and C beside your own pet said "Nothing to interact with". Companions (Pet, stance, Stay, Follow, Take Wing), party members (Follow Me, Stay Here, Go Home), workers (Inspect, Schedule, Dismiss) and befriendable wild creatures are all reachable now, with the wild tier ranked last so it never steals a campfire. — SamV
  • Shift+Enter did not sell the whole stack, which two places in the shop UI said it would. Broken since 23 May: the shop gained a keyboard mapping for it copied from the inventory, but no listener was ever added, and an overlay match is final — so the key was swallowed and went nowhere at every vendor. The advertised compare also failed with caps lock on. An audit found this was the game's only advertised-but-dead binding. — SamV
  • Right-click companion and party orders were dead clicks for a co-op joiner. The stance, Stay Here, Follow Me, Pet, Follow, Stay and Go Home rows sent nothing to the host while the floating text still painted, so it looked like the order was given and then reverted. They now ship to the host like the Companion Panel already did. Shift+O stance cycling ships too, and Take Wing carries the wyvern's identity so a joiner's flight stamps the right cooldown instead of burning the host's wyvern.
  • Co-op actions other than mining lagged noticeably. The host's reply was sent before the game had committed the new state, so the answering frame carried the acting player's old position — 13KB of pure waste — and then a 120ms coalescing gap held the real answer behind it. A client waited a full round trip to be told it had not moved. There is now exactly one answering snapshot, sent immediately. Measured at 200ms injected round-trip latency: keypress to sprite movement went from 604-958ms to about 300ms, and the move lands on the first answering snapshot. Mining always felt smooth because the prediction gate blocks only position updates, so a mining strike kept its full local effect while a walk's only visible effect was the one thing the gate dropped.
  • Riposte and Evasive Strike never countered. Both granted a counter-damage stat that nothing in the game read. A melee miss is the dodge, so it now applies alongside thorns-on-miss.
  • Berry bushes inspected as generic "Bush · Dense vegetation" while harvesting the same bush named it a Wild Strawberry. Both tooltip paths now read the species record, and the right-click menu gained the Harvest row the tooltip text promises. About two thirds of real overworld bushes carry a species; dungeon bushes are pure dressing and carry none.

TOOLS

  • Sprite editor: pasted submissions were being silently discarded (the canvas reloaded the old sprite and Save wrote it back), the browser opened on an empty tab, some terrain keys saved to a slot nothing reads so "Saved!" changed nothing, resetting an added variant shifted every later variant, Add Variant on animated entities overshot by the frame count, and undo/redo double-fired. Queue accept now normalizes palettes the same way manual saves do, and an unparseable payload is skipped rather than rejected and destroyed.
  • Editor catalog: 15 new paint targets, including 14 spawnable creatures that had no base sprite and no editor home. The wiring audit now reports honestly for boats, workers and equipment keys that can never render.
  • Submission tool: the server validates grids, palettes and variants before anything reaches Discord, storage or the overrides file, and the "new variant" box no longer pre-ticks on tiles that have no variants.

KNOWN ISSUES

  • Ten perks still have no painted art and show their glyph instead.
  • Four tame pairings are still cross-family — marsh toad to hound, turtle to otter, elk to phoenix, scorpion to tortoise. Fixing them needs new wild creatures, so they are recorded rather than fixed.
  • Some coastal hamlets generate mostly underwater (Emberforge and Tidehollow are near totally ocean). The settlement layout ignores the water mask; it needs its own pass.
  • Voidberry bushes exist as content but are currently unreachable in a real world.
  • In first-person, moving the mouse re-renders the scene at up to 14 Hz, so a look-sweep alone rebuilds the 3D scene about 6.5 times a second — roughly 21% of frame time. This is the top remaining performance item and needs a play cycle to judge, not a headless measurement.
  • Mail rescue for renamed characters lives in the online hub service and takes effect only once that is deployed.
  • Co-op still resolves every turn on the host's machine, so a distant player pays the travel time per step. 0.13.0 removes the wasted extra round trip; it does not remove the underlying delay.
  • Both players need the same version. A mixed-version co-op party keeps the older behaviour.
  • Everything under Known Issues in the 0.12.1 notes still applies.