Roguefort Playtest · published
Roguefort Playtest — 0.10.0
I'm very underslept but glad to get this update out, as it's pretty massive. It has a pile of content I had squared away in dev branches, which I've been inspired to just get out there, as there seems appetite for it amongst the beta test team.
A lot of bug fixes too - a huge number of them. Thanks everyone for your ongoing support and feedback and championing of the game. Big weekend ahead - enjoy this one :-)
Added — Mythic beasts
- 12 mythic beasts: Moon Hare, Frost Ewe, Ember Auroch, White Hart, Crystal
Hound, Pale Wanderer, Heartwood Elder, Old Brine, Ravenkin Matriarch, Salt
Wyrm, Moonveil Moth, Shepherdless Flock.
- Each has a seed-fixed home territory, so it is in the same place in your world
every time.
- Built to be glimpsed and lost. The sighting, the tracks and the traces are the
reward.
- Territory tells appear before the animal does — tracks, bent grass, signs of
passage.
- Legendary milks (moonmilk, frost milk, ember milk) feed the full cheese matrix.
- Legends tab in the creature codex. All 12 are silhouettes until sighted.
Added — Roaming bosses
- 3 persistent world bosses: Hollow Hart, Cinder-King, Gravewalker.
- Seed-deterministic circuits. They exist whether or not you are looking.
- Telegraphed approach.
- Wound persistence — a boss you drove off stays injured until you meet again.
- Titles and relics on kill.
- Settlement captains post world-global boss bounties, offered only when the
boss is genuinely within reach. Hint text uses its real last known position.
- The Gravewalker standing motionless in daylight is intended, not a bug.
Added — Wonders and one-time events (thanks R1 especially for your thread that inspired me to get this stuff off dev branches and merge into main)
- 7 wonder sites, each with its own verb. Shrines of the Green (Pray), sword in
the stone (Pull), watchtowers (Climb, which marks your map), colossal
skeletons, hot springs (Bathe), night-only moon pool (Gaze), faerie rings
(Step in, which flings you across the world).
- 10 roadside mysteries: burial cairns, poachers' caches, frozen adventurers,
gallows trees.
- Undiscovered wonders glint from 60 tiles away, so you find them by looking
rather than by grid-searching.
- 4 once-per-world events. A night funeral procession that teaches you what the
deep-touched are if you follow it to the end. A crystal golem with 4
conversations spread months apart. An aurora-serpent that sheds exactly one
scale. A comet whose payload makes you faster under the stars.
- Scholar Investigate quests dress as pilgrimages when aimed at a wonder.
- Hermits teach a recipe to the first traveller who listens.
- 20 new location-tied narrator events — riftstone resonance, graveyard vigils,
battlefield echoes, fen wisps, tundra auroras, tidal gifts.
- Generic gold-and-butterflies events fade in the middle of nowhere.
Added — Mounts and travel
- Rideable mounts: saddle horses from village herders, blizzard-proof highland
yaks, desert dune striders, and a great stag that accepts nothing but a
heartwood bolete.
- Riding replaces base speed. Four tiles a turn on good road.
- Mounts panic under fire and wait for you at dungeon mouths.
- Right-click anywhere on the world map to travel there. Arbitrary points, not
just known locations. The hostile-interrupt brake is intact.
Added — Companions and eggs
- Growth stages: egg to hatchling to juvenile to adult, over turns spent feeding
and bonding. Stats scale by stage, and babies cannot fight.
- Wolf, bear and snow-owl packs rarely travel with a cub, which can be
befriended once the adults are dealt with.
- Adult wyverns carry the whole party to any activated waystone.
- Wyrm nests: 2 or 3 scorched clutch sites per world in high volcanic country.
Taking an egg has a 65% chance of summoning the brood-mother, 25% if you were
sneaking, and she does not give up at the distance everything else does.
- Beast handlers sell wyrm eggs for 1,200 gold. Snow-owl eggs in eagle eyries.
Added — Loot
- 24 rare trophies across the bestiary at 1-5%, scaled by item find. Wyvern
rennet, drake bile, a golden egg if you are lucky.
- 5 new legendaries themed on the mythic beasts.
- Wanderer's Raiment, a 4-piece set hidden in wonder sites.
- 3 new artifacts in the island treasure pool.
Added — Rumours, books, maps
- NPCs tease real, far-off content. Mythic territories get pinned to your map
when someone tells you about one, and wonder sites have their own rumour lines.
- 15 aspirational teasers pointing at things you cannot do yet.
- Buying a round at the tavern guarantees a rumour.
- Treasure maps from bandits, barrels and back-shelf vendors, drawing a real X
on the atlas.
- 8 new books, some of which name where their subject lives.
Added — Food, drink and the water belt
Off Geno's feedback, which confirmed the tiered proposal.
- Water moved to a belt slot. One upgradable container with a volume pool of
125/200/300 replacing the old per-sip charges. Drinking fills you up rather
than nibbling at the number, and it is refused outright when you are not
thirsty. The starter pouch arrives empty. Existing saves migrate.
- Belt key and readout. Shift+3 to drink, and a [3] tile in Quick Slots showing
container, volume and capacity, dimmed when empty and outlined in blue when
you are thirsty with water left. The thirst nudge names the key.
- 34 table cheeses are food. They restore hunger and carry small long buffs of
300 to 1,000 turns by rarity, anchored by a slow Well Fed regen. Tactical,
utility and healing cheeses are untouched. Eating is blocked above 90 hunger,
and food buffs replace each other rather than stacking.
- 8 cooked meals at campfire and stove, built from ingredient classes rather
than exact items — any cooked meat or fish, a table cheese, a crop, a curated
herb. A refused cook consumes nothing. Fish matching is data-driven.
- 6 tavern ales, short and strong, limited by a Drunk debuff (-2 vision, no
second ale while it is on you) and a flat thirst cost. Barkeeps stock 2 or 3
ales and a cooked meal or two per tier, with a premium reserve at the top tier.
- 6 named cheese-and-ale pairings, which fire when the matching cheese buff is
already running. The combat cheeses are in the pairing families too.
- HUD chips for ale and meal buffs, and the pairing is named when one lands.
- Desert thirst scaling is now wired into Adventure Mode. It was fort-only code,
so the Sun Wastes had never once drained you faster than anywhere else.
Added — The Old Mouth bank
- Personal Vault, a per-save cloud chest in the ender-chest tradition. Only the
owner can see or touch it.
- Community Chest, one shared pool. Leave what you can spare, take what you
need. Donor name and tag are stamped by the server, donations expire after 7
days, and an anti-vacuum limit caps you at 10 takes an hour.
- Both sit by the return stone and move items only through escrow, so a deposit
can never exist in two places at once.
Fixed — The Old Mouth
- Mail was vanishing. The items were not lost, they were delivered to the wrong
person. Recipients were matched by display name with most-recently-seen
winning, so any duplicated name silently routed a parcel to a stranger. Every
player now has a postal tag of their name plus four hex digits, the recipient
is resolved on the server rather than trusted from the client, and an
ambiguous name is refused before your items enter escrow.
- The mail composer attaches whole stacks on click, opens a quantity picker on
right-click, and never hides the count.
- A pet you enabled after entering the hub was invisible to everyone else. Your
presence card of pets, equipment and skin only ever rode the frame sent when
you joined. Appearance is re-declared mid-session now, and players on older
builds are fixed without updating.
- Auction listings expired in 30 minutes. The durations were set in minutes so a
tester could watch an expiry resolve inside one session, which means items
nearly always expired before another player logged in to see them. Listings
now run 1, 3 or 7 days, the deposit curve is softened, and a cap of 20 active
listings per seller does the throttling the clock used to.
- Auction browsing was broken invisibly. Listings were ordered by expiry and
search only scanned the first 200 rows, so a freshly posted item sorted last
and could never be found. Newest first now, with search done properly.
- The Scholar was selling hatchets. They had no stock of their own and fell
through to the general goods shelf, which is tier-one hardware, always. They
sell books now.
- A shelf that never said SOLD OUT would still refuse the sale. Seven hub
shelves wrote their stock under one key and read it back under another, so the
display and the purchase were reading two different ledgers.
- The hub accused you of burgling a house eleven thousand tiles away. The
trespass readout is only written and cleared by the overworld turn pass, so
whatever it said the moment you used the market stone froze there for the whole
visit, and in co-op the host kept rebroadcasting it. It clears on leaving the
overworld now. Underneath was something worse and unreported: indoor scenes
reuse small local coordinates while the building cache holds world coordinates,
so a settlement near the map origin could overlap the hub and make its doors,
locks and movement blocks real inside it.
Fixed — Co-op
- The joining player appeared to starve, and eating did nothing. The drain rate
was always correct. The real bug was that the bag's Eat button ran only on the
joiner's own screen, the host never heard about it, and the next sync erased
the meal.
- That turned out to be a whole family rather than one button. This build sweeps
eating, cooking including Cook All, filling and boiling the water belt,
gutting fish, drag-and-drop equipment moves, tool cycling, sneaking, Phase
Step, companion abilities and feeding (which also checked the host's bag for
the treat), livestock orders, notice-board turn-ins, card-game winnings, the
whole fishing catch, lockpicking, book bonuses, family life, and the homestead
ledger. All of it now goes through the host and comes back confirmed.
- Dev builds now watch for the pattern itself. A joiner mutating something the
host owns logs a warning, and the co-op test harness fails on that warning.
Fixed — World map and settlements
- Roads are drawn where they actually are. The map drew a smoothed spline that
had drifted from the segments the game walks on, and over three quarters of the
road you could see did not exist on the ground.
- The map no longer reveals places you have never been. Fog lifts only for what
the player genuinely saw.
- Cities were just big blocks dropped on the map. A settlement stamped a
hard-edged clear zone and stopped. Town edges now dissolve back into whatever
the wild would have grown there, ramping from nothing at the built core to full
density at the outer ring, and never onto or beside a road or gate.
- Rumours of a nearby dungeon now reach you on foot, once per location, at the
same range the map marker appears. The pin is deliberately jittered.
- Waypoint and death-site arrows stay on the overworld. They were drawing inside
dungeons, subtracting overworld coordinates from a dungeon-local grid and
pointing at nothing real. The waypoint itself is untouched.
- Waypoints can be renamed.
- Homes bar their doors at night, so the burglary gate knows about bedtime.
Fixed — Numbers and HUD
- The HUD counted every container in the world including locked ones, while the build gate spends only
from unlocked containers within twenty tiles. Two pools, one number. The
counters now show exactly what the gate will honour where you are standing,
with a dim "(+N stored)" for everything you own but cannot reach. "Need
resources!" also explains whether material is too far, locked, or absent.
- That turned up a silent one. "Expand the home" always refused on migrated
saves, because family-home expansion was the last caller still reading the
legacy resource counter alone, and that counter is zero for everyone. It spends
like every other build now.
- The settlement build cap could not fit a single cottage at a flat 30. It rides
the trust curve now — 30 at Friendly, 120 at Honored, 300 at Revered, 600 at
Exalted — and build mode shows your headroom, red at the cap.
- A flat bonus turn is not a percentage. Relentless Pursuit read "+1 %" on the
free-turn-on-kill line. The rest were audited and it was the only wrong one.
- Settled Stance's conditional first-hit armor is itemised on the character
sheet's Armor row instead of quietly folded in.
Fixed — Art and sprites
- 12 community sprite submissions accepted: boar, marsh hound, a terrain tile,
and new sand and deep wyrms. AMAZING WORK TEAM PIXEL ART. Thank you ArkHaven and Merlin and the art team.
- Arrows look like arrows, bolts look like bolts, sling stones look like stones.
All ammunition fell through to the generic sparkle.
- 61 material items were rendering as a generic hide. Bones, eggs, milk, tusks,
antlers, scales, named pelts, fangs, claws, plumes, silk, crystal, powders and
bottled liquids now use the sprite that depicts them. A lot of placeholders still to do but it's progress.
- Every dungeon lurker bleeds, rattles and roars in its own voice. 69 creatures
had no substance or attack-sound entry, and because those lookups quietly
default, nothing ever broke and no test noticed. The Deep Wyrm has been the
rocky-biome boss for months while bleeding ordinary red blood. All 69 are
wired, and a new creature now ships fully wired or the audit I wrote fails.
- Unread bookshelves show green spines alongside the amber glow.
- The sprite editor browses every entity the game can render. It is derived from the registries properly again.
Fixed — Interface
- The perk chooser holds still under the mouse. The modal grew and shrank with
each description, re-centring itself and sliding the cards out from under your
cursor. The detail panel is a fixed height now, sized from the worst case
across all 100 perks.
- Lists stop teleporting your selection to the middle of the screen. Keyboard
scrolling slid rows under a stationary mouse, the hover handler grabbed
whatever row landed under it, and the scroller chased that. Fixed in the shop,
cooking, book collection and world select.
- The spell belt stays where you put it. Two faults stacked. Entering a dungeon
hides the Manna row, which re-centred the vertical belt and walked it right,
and a widget pinned to the right edge could be dragged fully off-screen with no
way back. Slots hug the pinned edge now, and anything dragged off-screen is
recovered to a grabbable strip.
- Quick slots stop hoarding cheese. Auto-add swept every cheese and meal into
the eat bar, which is the entire buff and potion system. Only plain food
auto-slots now.
- Clean water stays clean. Bump-fill offered by default without checking whether
the source was worse than what you carry, and a fill blends to the worse of the
two. Bump-fill is only the default when it cannot degrade your water. Filling
from a murky pond is still available as a deliberate act.
- The mastery choice modal waits for you again. A blind 30-second timer was
throwing away a permanent, player-paced choice.
- Three more modals had the same self-closing timer — NPC dialogue at 30
seconds, lore chapter at 30, quest offer at 120. All four valves are gone.
- A failed aim no longer eats your next step. Pressing F with no targets in range
left aim mode armed with no cursor, so the next direction key became a
point-blank shot: "Too close to shoot!" and no movement.
- Shift+key combinations can be captured when rebinding controls. Pressing the
modifier used to commit as the binding by itself.
- Books you have read are marked "read" everywhere you triage loot.
- Resting no longer sounds like casting a holy spell.
- NPCs stop leaning on bars that are not there. A Kind Beggar was found "leaning
at the bar" in an open street, because the social flavour table never checked
the venue existed. Beggars have their own honest lines now.
Fixed — How to Play
- The help modal still opened on Fort Mode, a mode that left the title screen
months ago, and its tab bar ran off the right edge with no scroll and no hint
that more existed.
- The remaining 8 tabs are rewritten to be update to date.
- Newly documented stuff - lots of it. A lot was missing...
- All the numbers are pulled from the constants that own them, so the help can
only drift when the balance does.
- Opening a system intro from the Help screen left the modal underneath fully
live. Arrow-down scrolled the text behind the popup, arrow-right changed the
tab behind it, Enter opened a second one and Escape closed both at once. Fixed
at the root, so being on top of the input stack now means something. Ideally keyboard input working perfectly.
Fixed — Other
- Floating combat text appeared twice at random. React can replay a state update,
and the guard against duplicates only remembered the single most recent one, so
an A, B, A, B replay walked straight through it.
- Smoke actually blinds now. No tracking through it, blind flailing only, and
smoke-then-hide works as a tactic. (Matt)
- Sky-fall events cannot land inside an enclosed house.
- Night creatures slink away at dawn even when nobody witnessed the sunrise.
- Explore quests instantly credit dungeons you had already cleared before taking
the job.
- Dungeon clear percentage tracks kills rather than the boss's death, and
"cleared" announces once, on a genuine full clear.
- A companion told to Stay holds its ground while hunting, and its level is
reconciled from cumulative XP. That is the pet showing 83 and 54 at once.
- Foraging inside a settlement produces local goods, which that settlement's own
vendors will refuse to buy.
- Wilderness supply barrels can be searched by bumping them, not just by
right-click.
- Catapults and traps no longer target your own summons and party.
- Clothing bought from vendors can be worn.
- Reed beds stopped painting themselves as ponds, and you can no longer fish in
them.
- Keepers live above their shops with the overflow lodging at the inn, instead of
fifteen villagers sleeping in one cottage.
Known issues
- This release adds a great deal of content that is meant to be rare. If you play
for a few hours and see none of it, that may be correct. Tell me anyway,
because "rare" and "unreachable" look identical statistically, possibly. IF that makes sense. I am so tired right now lol.
- Mythic beasts are tuned to escape you. If one feels impossible rather than
elusive, pls let me know.
- Roaming bosses reconcile their position across long absences. If you ever see
one appear somewhere it could not plausibly have walked to, screenshot the map.
- In co-op, two players trading at different vendors at the same moment can still
mis-read each other's purse cap. The real fix means shipping the vendor's full
state with the payload.