Roguefort Playtest · published
Roguefort Playtest - 0.9.0
Big one this time - a couple days worth of heavy dev work packed into one patch.
The headline is a full combat and balance overhaul - the danger curve, armor, evasion, backstab and loot all got reworked so that going deep actually means something and the numbers stop breaking at the top end. On top of that: a ground-up dungeon variety pass, the next act of the main story, a findable-shops sweep through towns, and a stack of the detailed reports you all sent after 0.8.9 (thank youuuu).
As always I've tried to itemise everything and answer it with an eye for detail and legibility, so we can chat further about the nitty gritty if anyone wants to. Also, I like to archive it here for antiquity. The balance changes are a large swing on purpose, so if any of it feels off - too soft, too spiky, a floor that shouldn't be that lethal - tell me the zone and I'll dial it in. There's some big branches that have been developed for ages, now rolling into this, as people were knocking on the door of some systems that I really needed to get a move on.
Thanks again, beta test crew, and happy Rogueforting.
COMBAT & BALANCE (THE BIGGIE)
- Enemy strength now follows a geometric curve - roughly x1.55 per overworld zone tier and x1.30 per dungeon floor - instead of the old near-flat ramp. Deep zones and deep floors are meant to be genuinely dangerous now, not a slightly bigger version of the shallow ones. Affix rolls scale with the area level too, so the gear you find out there keeps pace. (Peter)
- Evasion has diminishing returns. It used to be linear, which meant stacking toward ~100% evasion made you literally untouchable - an immortality tee. High evasion is still strong, it just can't reach the wall any more, and bosses can true-strike through it so they're never a free hit-race.
- Armor's damage-reduction constant now scales by tier. A fixed constant let ~73 armor floor every incoming hit to 1 damage, so you could park in a high zone and farm it forever. The floor now rises with the content.
- Backstab is capped at 8x and no longer stacks on top of a crit - a clean opener is still a huge hit, just not a one-shot-anything multiplier.
- You now gain +2 max HP per level, and your HP re-clamps correctly when you swap gear (a max-HP change no longer leaves you at a stale value).
- The legacy attribute UI that no longer drove anything is hidden.
- Frontier military scales with the zone tier, with two new enemy ranks - Veteran and Elite. Deep patrols are lethal now instead of a speed bump.
- Vendor stock is capped at Epic (no more legendaries on the shelf), forge rerolls escalate in cost instead of being a cheap slot-machine, and a reroll bug that could hand out a free upgrade is fixed.
DUNGEONS
- High-tier dungeon loot now tracks the danger dial. "It outscaled T4 and nothing made me go ooh" - an archlich was handing out 184 gold. Boss gold now scales non-linearly with tier, boss drops have a rarity floor (T4 guarantees Epic+, T5 is half legendary), and high-tier bosses roll bonus Epic+ items on top. The reward finally matches the fight. (Peter)
- Stale saves re-tier their dungeons on load. On an old save the danger label had drifted away from the dungeon's real level, so the reward and danger dials disagreed. Loading now re-derives the tier from the real level. (Peter)
- Dungeons were "oatmeal" (thanks Matt!) - every archetype was generating byte-identical layouts. A five-phase rebuild: floor RNG is now salted by biome and depth, each floor pulls its own layout profile (open chambers, tight tunnels, chokepoints), rare floor variants show up, and a set of archetypes that existed but were never reachable are now routed into the world. Save-safe - existing dungeons re-anchor their stairs to the tiles already saved. A big branch of the game freshened up and merged here - dungeons should be looking fresh and fancy.
- Dungeon difficulty is now geographic. Danger grows outward from the guild hubs (the pools that seed dungeon spawns), not from the dead centre of the world map, so the difficulty map actually reflects where the action is.
ENEMIES & THE WILD FRONTIER
- "It's REALLY wild out here, active fighting between factions" - except it was empty wilderness. Frontier bandits were spawning 25-40 tiles out, past the 20-tile despawn radius, so they were culled the very next turn while still off-screen: a phantom war you were told about but could never find. Bandits are now exempt from that cull, and the skirmish message only prints when a group was actually placed. (Peter)
- High danger tiers now actually feel wild - overworld spawn cadence and density both scale up with the tier, so a dangerous zone reads as dangerous the moment you step into it.
MAIN STORY
- A legibility pass on the main story: a spawn-flavoured on-ramp that adapts to where you begin, so the first thread is clear from the start, plus Act III of the Pursuit of Corvax questline.
TOWNS, CITIES & VILLAGES
- Findable trades. Procedural settlements now advertise their shops with trade signs, signposts and promotional cues, pens are properly gated, and there are no more walled-off quarters you simply can't get into. "Still couldn't find a store" should be a thing of the past. (SamV)
- Every village now has a general store - Jademouth had none at all. (SamV)
- NPCs named "The". The name generator could emit a bare function word as a whole name ("The goes about his day"). Those stopword names are now filtered out at the source.
- The starter spawn area is raid-immune - your first hearth is a cosy one, safe from the opening-night raid.
- Player-buildable waystone: you can now craft a base anchor straight into the fast-travel network. (ArkHaven)
QUESTS
- Peter's herders lined up doing identical work. Every quest-giver in a settlement was offering the same village_clear job - the signature was keyed to the settlement, not the giver, and the dedup only fired against active quests - so you'd see a row of identical '!' before accepting any. There's now one elected giver per settlement, and herders gather at the actual pen instead of a random croft. (Peter)
- Duplicate quest offers across types: "investigate" and "village_fetch" were each keyed under their own type, so the dedup never noticed they were the same goal and offered it twice. Collapsed to one shared signature.
SHOPS & ITEMS
- Shop gear comparison. Highlight an item at a trader and press C / Ctrl (or gamepad Y) to see its stats as deltas against whatever you've got equipped - no more buying blind to find out it was a downgrade.
- Cursed merchant gear was an invisible swindle. Vendors force-identify their stock, but the reveal left the curse flag hidden, so a cursed item read as a clean one right up until you wore it. It's now a labelled, discounted gamble - the CURSED tag shows and the price reflects the risk.
OLD MOUTH & CO-OP
- The "ghost clone". A player who left a social hall could hang around as a phantom for everyone still there. A silent half-open socket never acknowledged the close, so the eviction handshake hung and the peer was never announced as gone. Peers now retract the moment they're evicted, independent of the handshake. (Elfie)
- Shared mail across the whole hub, companion presence (you can see other players' pets on their trail), and a set of extended emotes. Companions are now visible and clickable in Old Mouth, with a proper mailbox UI.
- The companion roster is raised to 100 - 4 active plus 96 stabled. Zoo mode.
- Co-op fix batch: a host death no longer freezes the shared sim clock, joining worlds no longer diverge, context-menu clicks no longer get snapshot-reverted, dungeon AI is fixed, and there's a ping. (tee, Geno)
PERFORMANCE
- A self-diagnosing slow-turn breakdown plus two hot-path fixes, straight off SamV's 0.8.9 perf report. (SamV)
- Elfie's "laptop on fire". A water tint pulse was missing the sprite cache and re-reading pixel data every single frame, on top of some orphaned tile-health churn. Both fixed. (Elfie)
MENUS & UI
- Load Game got full controller and Steam Deck support, plus keyboard fixes: an Enter press bleeding in from the title screen was auto-opening a save, the list wouldn't scroll, and you can now copy a world's seed. (SamV)
- Keyboard access for dungeon travel (the less-than and greater-than keys), the mailbox and the legend - verbs that had been button-only are now bindable and documented. (SamV)
- Delete Save now keeps the menu on screen and actually removes the save from disk.
- The title-screen recital is ranked and collapsed, with a dedicated Legend page. (ArkHaven)
- The first-kill hint was reworded so it reads as a hint, not a threat of consequences. (SamV)
SPELLS & MISC
- Rest to restore Manna now counts a campfire, hearth or bed diagonally, not just on the four cardinal tiles - you no longer have to line up exactly beside it.
- Souring lore spam on turn one. The drift clock seeded at 0 while the world clock starts at 80,120 (the summer epoch), so the very first tick was back-dated about 40 intervals and dumped a wall of lore at once. The clock now anchors to the new-game start turn.
- Affinage was decreasing or no-op'ing stats. A legendary upgrade recomputed the values from the base definition with a mismatched scaler, so an 8/8 ring could come out 7/7. It now scales the live stats by the tier step, with a floor, instead of recomputing from scratch.
KNOWN ISSUES
- The combat rebalance is a deliberately large swing. If a particular zone or floor feels wrong - a boss that's a pushover, a patrol that's unfair, a wall you can't dent - tell me where and I'll tune it.
- 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.