Grim Realms update for 8 March 2023

First of all: If you are thinking about starting a new game - now might be the time! This patch change a lot of the in-game balances and should make the overall experience way more balanced, challenging and fun!

This patch adds the following:

• Perks have been changed so many of them are rankable and will increase in rank when used. For example dodging will increase the perk dodge, and each increased rank makes it more likely that attacks are dodged. Dark siphon is now ranked and gives +1 to dark power for each rank. This perk gets its rank increased by finding and using dark altars.
• New perks:
  Aimed Arc - fire great distances but with low accuracy with bows.
  Weapon proficiency - deal extra damage with a perticular weapon.
  Dark bolt - a ranged magic attack.
  Smite - a ranged magic attack used by Paladins.
• It is now possible to view the walkable grid, both indoors and outdoors.
• A new animal: giant rats, which can found in animal burrows when mining.
• It is now possible to change the looks of the interface, allowing for a more tailor made experience.

This patch changes the following:

• Greatly improves the performance of the peon-search-for-items-to-store function, which previously could cause horrible lag.
• When searching for food, villagers will take into account the quality and source of food. If starving villagers will also eat raw food, resulting in poison damage.
• Improves a few animation, mainly the over-head-swing when mining, chopping wood or attacking with two handed weapons. (Looks waaay prettier now!)
• Over all loot, trader items and drops from enemies have been balanced and there is now a chance of finding much higher quality gear.
• Over all balanced attackers, making early attacks easier and later attacks more difficult.
• When starting a new faction, the first event will always be a lone visitor. Also, in the first three weeks if your population is low, lone visitor events have a higher probablity of occuring.
• When blocking, deflecting or parrying an attack, extra damage will NOT be applied (like poison or fire damage), making shields and armor much more efficient.
• When creating a new faction and editing the units, its now possible to see the starting perks.
• Improved attackers AI.
• Improved the zoom function when clicking on news.
• Improves news messages relating to work not being finished.
• Gets rid of a few crashes, bugs and other inconviences.
• And many more tiny fixes and improvements which I am blanking on at the moment!

There is probably some edge cases I have missed, and if so: Please let me know how it works - I stand very ready for hot fixes!

As always: a billion thanks for the feedback, bug reporting and the encouraging and kind words!
And sorry for all the bugs! Please keep the feedback coming so I can make this game as enjoyable as possible!

Best wishes and all the love! <3
//Mattias

PS: There has also been reports about corrupted save files. I am REALLY sorry about those. These occur when the game crashes while saving. I am doing my best to make sure these don't happen at all, since it is often impossible to recover saves if the damage is too great.