Roguefort Playtest · published
Roguefort Playtest 0.9.2
A suggested/requested feature from ArkHaven reminded me that I had not integrated the volcanic biome and all the fun goodies in that region from the branch it was on into the main game. So, like the moniker of this patch suggests, strap yourselves in for a whole new biome (the promised volcanic region) which has named dragons, and for the time being a bunch of programmatically recoloured ArkHaven 4x4 dragon sprites, which will serve as the sprites for the big bad dragons of that area.
Beware though, it's probably more mid to end game content. Well, for me it would be. Maybe for you guys it'll be easier...
The rest is the usual bevy of your excellent reports and my best efforts to convert them into bug fixes and new features and polish etc.
Volcanic country and dragons
Cantal gets its volcanic region, properly, finally. Lava is a proper hazard: it burns on contact, blocks pathing, and creatures avoid it, so it reads as terrain you respect rather than decoration. Procedural worlds stamp a volcanic massif in the north-east, and the hand-authored continent you know n love gets The Brimstone Teeth.
Dragon lairs. The deep dungeons out there end on a proper set-piece... a large Fire Dragon with its own procedurally-generated name, a colour that varies by breed, and loot worth the trip down. Too hot to handllllleeeeeeee (I need sleep).
Because "there's a volcano somewhere" is useless without a way to find it, there's now a biome map overlay, which was of course the original request from ArkHaven, which reminded me of all the work I hadn't hooked into the main game yet. Press B (or the Biomes button) on the world map and click a biome in the bottom-left legend. Matching regions light up and the rest dim, and named regions get a labelled callout at any zoom, so a highlight reads as a place, not just a glow. It only ever lights up ground you've already discovered, no free reveals, and the legend shows how much of each biome you've found so far.
Lockpicking (definitely not Skyrim lockpicking, no sir)
Lockpicking used to be a single hidden dice-roll bolted onto sneaking, and virtually invisible in the UI, and poorly signposted and wired into the game. So, it's now an interactive mini-game, a cousin of fishing essentially (that's where a lot of the code comes from anyway, so). Each nudge ticks a world turn (so you can be caught mid-pick), picks can snap under too much torque, and a higher sneak level makes the lock easier to feel out. Lock difficulty scales with what's behind the door: a wealthy household or a cheese cellar guards its secrets harder than a hovel.
And lovely of all, you can actually reach it now... fresh runs start with three lockpicks in the kit, bumping a locked door opens the mini-game (with hints if you're pick-less), and the keyboard c verb reaches locked doors. A barred home's own door, which used to be walkable but offer no way in, now hands you the pick prompt too. Hurrah for legibility in a roguelike (I hope).
Cosy starter spawns, for real
A fresh save was reading "besieged, not cosy", as SamV aptly put it... bears wandering up by day, a dire wolf one-shotting you on the first night while you built a house near the starter town, a wolf parked at the inn door. What a nightmare! The cause was that only night raids were ever held back near your origin - the ordinary wandering predators had no safe zone at all. Since danger is broadly keyed to how far you are from your spawn tile (with some exceptions but let's not discuss that here), building even 50 to 120 tiles out quietly dropped you into the mid-range predator pools, and the new balance curve made those bites YASD bait, without the S. Now, within 150 tiles of the world origin or your set home, the spawn pool is clamped to the gentle band, forced to tier 1, and stripped of anything that hunts in a pack or gets two strikes a turn. Your first hearth is a homeland, not a frontier. (SamV, thank you!).
Main story and quests
A main-story dungeon could read 100% CLEAR and yet the quest would never tick over. The completion check and the "is this dungeon cleared?" record were keyed on two different things, a pinned seed on one side, the location id on the other, and when they disagreed, the guardian objective just never flipped. Both sides now agree on the location id, and old saves that had already cleared such a dungeon auto-complete the stranded quest on load.
Combat and dungeons
Dungeon auto-descend, two fixes: the DOWN button used to appear the instant a floor loaded, letting you beeline for the exit without exploring... it now waits until you've actually found the downstairs. And it stopped braking every turn one of your own summoned creatures (a curd golem or whey sprite) wandered into view - it now correctly ignores your own units and only halts for real threats. (thx Peter and tee)
The armour stat tooltip described flat damage reduction - it now describes the tiered curve armour actually uses.
Homes and world
A burnt-down door still barred the house. "Barred from within" isn't a property of the door tile, it's a logical seal on the building, so when fire charred a barred door down to floorboards, the door was gone but the bar wasn't, and you'd keep bumping into "the door is barred from within" at a doorway that no longer existed. Burning a barred door down now lifts the bar, exactly as picking it would.
Menus and UI
World Select overlap at 1920x1080: on a wide screen the per-row text column shrank to make room for the buttons, and the "N turns / date" line spilled right and rendered under the Play/Co-op/Delete buttons. The panel's wider now and that metadata line wraps instead of overlapping, verified clean at 1920x1080, 1280x800 and 960x600. (SamV)
NPC context menu clipping off the bottom of the screen. A full menu opened near the screen edge could run its last few actions off the viewport where you couldn't reach them, worst on the Steam Deck's short screen. The menu now caps its height and scrolls internally, and keyboard/d-pad selection scrolls the highlighted row into view. (Elfie)
A couple of stray-token fixes: the story-reminder hint pointed at the wrong quest-log key (, it's actually , and it now shows whatever you've rebound it to), and a couple of toast messages were printing strings wrong. Both routed through the proper text renderer now.
Two level-up modals opening from a single spell cast, a spell mastery tier-up and a character level-up, shared one Enter press: confirming the tradition silently picked a spell upgrade underneath it too. Each modal now owns its own input, so one Enter does one thing. (SamV).
Known issues
The volcanic regions and dragon lairs are brand new. If a lair feels under- or over-tuned, or the lava hazard bites in a spot that feels unfair, pls tell me where and I'll dial it in.