Hello friends!

Today's new version has a bunch of improvements across the board. But I did try to focus in on combat to improve how that feels. It was pretty frustrating to fight enemies, and I tried to fix a lot of the weird behaviors you'd often see when trying to take down an enemy.

As well, I worked on making some of the blueprints and profession more useful. For example, you can now actually use potions! This is tied to the newly added utility slot.

Let's take a look!

Consumable Items and New Utility Slot

The utility slot can be used to equip food, drinks, potions, and any consumable item. You select the equip items from the Uniforms window (U) like normal. But then you can left-click the item in the utility slot, and the entity will use it. Don't worry, food and drinks are automatically used when needed. I also want to eventually set up conditions for players to be able to trigger consumables the way they want. i.e., "HP < x%, use potion."

Players can now use youth potions to reduce the age of their settlers. This will help keep your favorite settlers around! Careful, though. You can make them children again. And we all know how useful they are.

Animated Plants

I've also been working on making all plants animated. I'm not 100% there yet, but I've got quite a few down.

Progression Tuning and Organization

A lot of work has gone into tuning and cleaning up progression. I've combined a few research trees together to make things easier to find and more organized.

General Polish and Combat Improvements

An absolute unit worth of work has gone into polish. As always, tooltips have seen a ton of work, but most of all, the game logs (N) have seen a lot of work. I've organized the logs into categories and tried clean them up a bit better. As well, I've added some helpful tooltips. For example, below, you can see combat details for the Vytrax Claw attack.

Something else I've added is damage types. There are currently four:

• Piercing – Ignores half of the target's toughness.

• Slashing – Doubles the damage bonus from critical hits.

• Bludgeoning – Ignores half of the target's evasion.

• Magic – Ignores all of the target's toughness.

These are to help give the combat a bit more depth when creating your fighter uniforms.

As always, I still have lots and lots of work to better communicate these sorts of things. So please let me know if you want something. I'll probably add it!

Ok, there's so much more, but I'll leave it to the patch notes to guide you through the rest.

🐛 Bug Fixes

• Several combat related behaviors which caused entities to get stuck or have incorrect attack output.

• Health action text wasn't showing up.

• Gwnvayth didn't drop the rose crown on death.

• Newly spawned Gwnvayths weren't spawning with the rose crown equipped.

• Load game window didn't keep the game paused.

• Entities could get stuck in job loops if an item was reserved and the reserve count wasn't updating other jobs.

• Container size wasn't showing up in tooltips.

• Plants couldn't be manually planted unless another plant was already present.

• Job position priority wasn't calculating correctly, causing nearby positions to be ignored.

• Planted saplings instantly became trees.

• Entities got stuck trying to stock items after being trapped in a block.

• Items in rooms became unclaimable if unreachable.

• Torches were getting placed on doors.

• Ambient shadows appeared over blueprints during certain job selections.

• Entities repeatedly picked up and dropped off items at the same spot due to a room priority bug.

• Returning from the overworld map sometimes caused chunks to not render.

• Items weren’t spawning after settling a new tile.

• Some game over dialogues weren’t playing correctly.

• Chickens weren’t laying eggs.

• Sky light wasn’t updating correctly under floors.

• Some paths didn’t open correctly after loading a save.

• Ardyn couldn’t leech life.

• Vertical climb wasn’t calculated correctly.

• Some NPCs didn’t attack during combat.

• Merchant items weren’t appearing in buy list.

• High-priority jobs blocked low-priority jobs from starting even when they failed.

• Steel items appeared before iron when spawning NPC entities based on player progression.

• Some plants didn’t drop items or spawn entities when mature.

• Saved plants didn’t produce crops.

• Nelescuro couldn’t expand past a certain size.

• Entities could over-level after becoming adults.

• Clicking on diet groups didn’t expand the list.

⚙️ Tuning / Content / Polish / Misc

• Combat tuned to be 100% less annoying. Better entity spacing and targeting. Enemies tuned way down to be less OP.

• Entities with combat disabled now flee instead of fighting.

• Children no longer earn XP (prevents unassigned profession leveling).

• Children now inherit a parent’s natural skill bonus (coin flip per skill).

• Children have a chance to get a +1 core skill bonus from parents.

• Performance improvements for stockpile storage and notifications.

• Trailmix recipe now unlocked via Campfire Cook research.

• Sentient entities can now drink from wells.

• Butcher Item now unlocked via Campfire Cook research.

• Moved Wood Block, Fence, and Beam to Wood-Work research.

• War research moved to the industry tree.

• Added coal, copper, and tin to Ember Rock and Sandstone terrain.

• All research nodes now cost 1 kingdom point.

• Lowered kingdom XP per level to 200 (from 400).

• Increased stack size of wood logs, stone chunks, and plant fiber to 10.

• Capped item stacks at 5,000 (except Ren) for performance.

• Stock room jobs are now global rather than room-locked.

• Farms now default to container-only stockpiles.

• Renamed Log skill to Forestry.

• Arboretums now use Forestry instead of Farming.

• Added more room requirement info to occupant groups.

• "+" button now appears beside rooms in room menu when searching.

• Improved water fill behavior.

• Newly discovered items aren’t added to permission lists if some are prohibited.

• Improved animal/traveler spawn point search.

• Updated various icons with larger art.

• Added night mobs.

• Added off-screen HUD indicators (toggleable).

• Added damage types (piercing, slashing, etc.).

• Added more detail to combat logs.

• Added Logs button to bottom bar.

• Improved floating label visuals (Shift to hold).

• Added “Family” tab to entity window.

• New control group hotkeys: Ctrl + # to set, Shift + # to add, Alt = lock tooltip.

• Shift now adds/removes from previous selection.

• Clicking profession icon now opens the profession pop-up.

• Void Cell unlocks with Immortality Tomb research.

• Added utility item slot for consumables (food, drinks, potions).

• Health potion, youth potion, and sablixian tar now grant buffs.

• Tuned down Staff of Focus and spellbooks.

• Spellbook of Healing grants passive healing.

• Library research jobs now give XP at the cost of ink and paper.

• Added animation variance to idle terrain (e.g., plants, water).

• Merchant UI now shows item counts.

• Market rooms only show local items for sale.

• Merchants scale quality and quantity of items with kingdom level.

• Non-merchants now bring more Ren based on kingdom level.

• Only common/uncommon items are in custom loadouts unless specified by race.

• Increased custom loadout Ren.

• Reduced Gwnvayth spawn time.

• Gwdir now start with T’Thdir I unlocked.

• Increased decay reduction for items stored in the Nascien.

• More plants now have animations.

• Wells now unlock with the Wellhouse.

Up Next

This update addressed a lot of annoying things that kept me from enjoying the game. But, for the next update, I'm going to focus more on depth. There are five main things I will focus on:

• Character traits and personality - I want characters to have more of a unique feel to them. What makes them interesting and not just pawns.

• Scenarios - More unique scenarios to help mix things up.

• Mechanics Props - More things to build that affect the world.

• Profession and Room Impact - I want rooms and professions to affect output for jobs and provide bonuses in a way that isn't just job progress bonus. i.e., improve merchant item rarity by having a nicer market. Apply buffs to items if a settler is skilled at making the blueprint.
  I also want to try limiting what jobs can be done based on settler level. It doesn't make sense that a level 1 settler can make rutile weapons and gear and it makes your high level settlers not as important. I think I'd like to add some item degradation as well to help professions feel useful. Tailors for example could mend clothes that have been worn through.

• Items - More items in general especially ones that add to the game's lore.

That's all for now. Thanks for reading this far and for checking out the new build if you do!

Best,

Waylon