Roguefort Playtest · published
Roguefort Playtest, 0.9.3
Hey Beta tester team, this patch has quite a few bug fixes - major ones, in fact. Some relating to world generation, others to UI and UX. Thanks so much for the reports - I am burning the afterburners hot every day just to keep up, and it's awesome.
The Undermaw issues
* Elfie hunted the continent for the Undermaw and never found it, because it wasn't there. Entry is gated on standing on a staircase, and there was no staircase. It's now a real, stamped entrance with a cleared approach. (The first fix dropped it into dense forest and walled it in with trees, which would have shipped the same bug twice)
* It was also in the wrong ocean... The old coordinate sat on an offshore island about 1,250 tiles from the mainland and roughly 11,900 tiles due *north* of Thymerock, while the lore and the Warden who sends you there both say southeast. It's now southeast of Thymerock, on the mainland, in properly deadly country about 1,400 tiles from the nearest village.
* 81 of the world's 325 dungeon entrances, a full quarter, were sealed behind rock. Sorted that right out
Settlements are on dry land again
* "Frostfell is in the sea": three separate faults hiding under one screenshot, thanks to Elfie. Every location is now guaranteed painted land beneath it, checked across all 2,053 of them.
* Island settlements were placed against the island's *outline* while the ground underneath is read from a coarser grid; at the edges the two disagree, which floated Tidehollow and three island dungeons a cell out to sea. They now settle onto the nearest land.
* Vipertower, Moonden, Flamehelm and Sageward generated on dry ground but were ringed by deep lake with no road that reached them; the "roads" near them were scattered rock. They now get a built causeway to the nearest shore, and roads bridge lakes at any depth instead of stopping at the water's edge.
* Sea riftstones, sea-cave sites, lake dungeons and island sanctuaries are *meant* to be out there: boat-and-swim country, unchanged. They're just drawn correctly now.
The world map
* The map is repainted as a fantasy atlas, from a big merge of a dev branch inspired by AndyGeorge's world map reports. The old flat biome polygons are gone, replaced by blended terrain with relief shading, inked coastlines, and mountain and forest stamps, so a biome edge reads as coastline and country rather than a staircase of coloured blocks. It builds in the background and fades in over the old layers, so the map stays usable throughout, and zoom levels cross-fade instead of popping.
* Dragging the map opened the Set Waypoint popup when you let go: a click event fires at the end of every drag, and the map took every one at face value. It now knows the difference.
* Esc closed the entire map instead of the popup you had open. The map already knew to close a popup first; the layer above it was overriding that.
* The ASCII glyph overlay is visible again, it had been buried under the opaque map texture, and shows through at local zoom.
Loot: stop vacuuming junk, let the ground clean itself
Off two reports that turned out to be the same problem from opposite ends: Briarios ("tired of throwing out grey items and 5 different seeds and pinecones") and ArkHaven ("the game never clears them").
* Auto-pickup was unconditional: stepping on an item picked it up, so the only way to refuse something was to never walk on its tile. There's now a **Loot tab in Settings**, and the rule behind it is that the filter *suppresses pickup and never destroys*. A filtered item stays where it lies, drawn dimmed, and right-click, Pick Up always overrides. I cut auto-destroy: it can't be undone, and the first time it eats something it shouldn't, the feature is dead to you.
* Rarity gates gear and only gear. Commons here *are* the crafting economy, flora, seeds, wood and milk feed cheesemaking and building, so an ARPG-style "hide commons" switch would strangle half the game. Everything else is category toggles plus an "I already hold N of these" cap, and the cap is what ends the fifth stack of pinecones. Nothing filters if it's currency, a book, a blueprint, spell cheese, a culture, ammo, a tool, epic-or-better, or something that fills an *empty* equipment slot, so a level-one player can't walk past their first sword.
* A full pack used to fling the item onto the tile next to you, which smeared junk across the map one step at a time. A full pack now leaves it where it was and says so.
* Everything you had ever dropped was exempt from decay, permanently. Ordinary loot rots; your discards never did, the other half of why the ground filled up. Decay is now territory-aware: anything within 45 tiles of your campfire, or on a stockpile zone, is a stash and keeps forever; only genuine wilderness litter rots. Settings can put it back to keeping everywhere.
* Nothing irreplaceable rots. Locked items, story pieces (the Rindstone, the Undermaw wheels), and anything you only get once, books, blueprints, recipes, keys, are exempt outright. Dropping the Rindstone in a field is not a way to delete your endgame. Existing saves get the full grace period on everything already lying about, so nothing you left out gets swept on load.
Quests andreputation
* SamV turned in a quest advertising +5 reputation, was paid 1, and got a bare "(x0.25 settlement saturated)" to explain it. Working as designed, but explained nowhere in the game, and the obvious reading, that it recovers if you leave for a while, is wrong. It doesn't decay. Reputation is per-faction but the budget is per-*settlement*, so the remedy is geographic: take your next job somewhere else. Every quest offer, notice-board card and quest-log row now quotes the reduced number up front with the sticker price struck through, names the settlement, and says what to do about it. The notice board has a budget meter and the Standing tab has a Settlements section, so you can see the wall before you hit it.
* The caps were too low, so they're up: village 60 to 120, town and fort 120 to 200, city 200 to 320. The old village budget was about seven quests, so rural players hit a quarter-rate wall before reaching Friendly. One settlement now carries you to Honored; an ordinary one still stops short of Revered, which is the point of a cap. And the hard cliff is a taper now: full rate under the cap, half rate for a way past it, quarter beyond. Existing saves get the relief on load.
Sailors, boats, fishing gear you can actually buy
* Elfie and ArkHaven both couldn't find sailor merchants. Nothing was technically missing, boats and fish were sold somewhere, but the trade was scattered, unrecognisable, and had a real hole: no vendor anywhere sold a fishing rod or a lure. There's now a **Ship Chandler**, the one-stop maritime outfitter: rods, lures, rope, sailcloth, nails, boats and a boat blueprint, and fishmongers stock starter tackle too, so fishing is buyable at any coastal fisher.
* Coastal placement is deliberate now, not a lucky roll: towns and cities put a chandler and a fisher on the coast, villages get a fisher, and coastal maritime-vendor coverage went from 40% to 87%. For landlocked starts, general stores now sometimes stock a Raft or Skiff blueprint, so you can learn to sail from mid-continent.
* Fixed the blueprint names that read "Blueprint: Raft Blueprint". Quite a lot of them turned up actually
Volcanic country, second pass
* Lava at night rendered as floating blocks: half-tile crusts and flecks hanging in the dark. Lava glows by itself, so it shouldn't have gone through the same day/night shading as everything else. It's lit properly now. (ArkHaven)
* Fire and dragon-lair dungeons stamp real lava instead of re-tinted deep water, which is why you could previously fill a waterskin from a lava pool, drink it, and fish in it. Fixed on new floors and existing saves... cooling crust is still walkable.
* The entire Brimstone Teeth was Tier 1. The range sits inside a nearby haven's safety ring, and that ring was flattening every dungeon in it to Easy: the scariest place in the world, full of beginner dungeons. Volcanic country is now judged before the haven's safety ring is applied, and uncleared volcanic dungeons in existing saves are re-tiered on load.
* Volcanic weather: ember showers, which are exactly what they sound like, and a thick brown smog. Volcanic regions only.
* The surface has its own wildlife now: fire drakes and salamanders, denser near dungeon mouths, and a phasing night specter called the Cinder Shade.
* There's a Fire Phoenix companion to win from bosses down there, which turned up something embarrassing: companion eggs had no Hatch option at all. Not the phoenix's, *any* egg's. Every companion egg in the game has been unhatchable from the inventory. They hatch now.
The tutorial actually finishes
* Quests meant to be handed in by talking can no longer be handed in by walking into someone. Thanks Merlin!
* The war-cheese introduction was talking over the wall bark, and anyone who ran ahead skipped that beat entirely. It gets room now, and fires however you arrive at that point.
* Polish: the finale pays out like every other step, the objective chip shows "Step N of M", and Skip Tutorial asks twice.
Old Mouth and NPCs
* Right-clicking the Keeper of The Melt gave you two "Talk" rows: the top opened dialogue, the bottom just logged "nods at you." Any NPC wearing two hats got two rows, and the Keeper wears three. (SamV)
* That dead nod was every bazaar stallholder's Talk, all eleven, because their trades had no lines written. They have proper ones now, as do the Exchange Broker and the Postmaster, whose dialogue existed but could only be reached by bumping into them. The rule now: if an NPC has anything to say, Talk is on the menu.
* The Old Mouth is a strict peace zone. There's no Attack option on anything in the hub, and the block sits at the single point every player-dealt hit passes through: melee, bumps, arrows, spells, hazard zones, explosions, 3D free-fire, so there's no route around it. The Wardens tell you off once rather than filling the log.
Performance & sound
* Market days stuttered. Every market update was writing a save on the main thread and blocking it for abput 300 milliseconds at a time, repeatedly. That save now happens in the background. The performance reporter itself was also lying to me: it stacked a duplicate observer every time you started a new game, so reports double-counted and the hitch warning could fire off a single stall. (SamV, Dogchiho)
* Rain kept playing over the title screen. Quitting stopped the biome ambience and the music, but nothing stopped the weather layer, so rain looped over the menu and into your next run. (Dogchiho)
Menus & misc
* Lifesteal was labelled as a percentage in three places, Kindred Thirst included. It's flat HP on hit, not a share of the damage: the maths was always right, the label was wrong. Corrected everywhere; no balance change.
Known issues
* The loot filter is new and it's making judgement calls on your behalf. If it ever leaves something on the ground you'd obviously want, tell me what and where, that's exactly the case I need. It never destroys anything: right-click, Pick Up always overrides.
* The world map atlas builds in the background the first time you open it in a world. On a slower machine you may see the old flat layers for a moment before it fades in. Expected, not a bug.
* In co-op, two players trading at different vendors at the same moment can still mis-read each other's purse cap. Known; the real fix means shipping the vendor's full state with the payload.