Greetings fellow gods,

With some delays and a broken release schedule, we finally have some significant features and content updates for you: the introduction of the Vampire civilization and the overview section of the State Management screen.

Let's talk State Management first. We have a new screen where we'll manage our ever-growing empires and see what we can improve, like delivering missing input resources for buildings or re-shuffling buildings among families so they keep producing wealth.

On this new screen, we can create a state and edit it by changing its name or banner.

The warnings for various settlements are filterable, so we can customize which parts are relevant for us. They also link to specific settlements in the Settlement Management screen.

This screen will continue to be expanded in our minor updates to cover more areas of State Management, such as managing the military forces, the caravan economy, and more. With the traditional roguelike and sandbox framework already solid, we're entering the strategy-genre-inspired phase of the Soulash 2 endgame gameplay to finalize the core game design.

Now onto the final civilization promised in our Roadmap. The Vampires are not immediately playable, just like the Undead. Instead, a transformation is available through the Necromancy skill, as an alternative to becoming a Lich. The vampires come with a single settlement in the grasslands and, like any civilization, will require time to develop in a new world. Through Vampirism, it's possible to offer immortal life through the gift of our blood to our beloved, before they die and have to be resurrected as a zombie. Possibly a better deal, but still not exactly alive.

Here's the full changelog for today's update:

Added

- State Management Screen - Overview: this new screen displays stats of all controlled settlements, allows changing the state name, crest, or faction colors, and shows problems our towns have.

- New civilization: Vampires.

- Added a new alternative path for the Necromancy skill to become an immortal Vampire.

- Added a Necromancy ability to turn NPCs residing in our towns into Vampires.

Changed

- Reverted Crafting Screen change that caused crafting sometimes to produce incorrect stack size.

- Only adults can lead caravans/work in buildings/gather tile resources/work in military companies.

- Occupation armies cannot be sent to conquer.

- You cannot enlist the local population from conquered towns in the occupying army.

- The settlement screen now shows if the settlement is capital or conquered by you.

- Player state capital is rendered on the world map with an extra crown icon.

- Vampiric Touch will now provide 25% of its damage as Bloodlust for Vampire characters.

- Added more state name generation variety for Dwarves, Elves, Goblins, Orcs, and Trolls.

- Displaying the race of characters in tooltips.

- Color coding liquid types in container tooltips.

Fixed

- Fixed some dropdowns incorrectly processing input keys.

- Fixed dropdowns' handling of keyboard navigation: up & down, tab for cycling, and enter for selecting.

- Fixed recruits counting as two people in the settlement screen exploit.

- Fixed removing soldiers from buildings not changing the military stat of the settlement.

- Fixed assignments from and to the Recruit positions.

- Fixed deleting a military building in the settlement screen not removing members from the company.

- Hearth returned to require a Stone entity instead of a Stone resource type, as that slight stone shift caused the collapse of the entire Human civilization in the world simulation.

Updates may remain irregular for a while, as we figure out a good pace. The primary goals are the t5 locations with multi-tile bosses and extensions to the newly introduced State Management Screen. After that, the Events System, and then I'll check again on what kind of fantastic suggestions you all have been leaving us on Discord's s2-suggestions channel, so make sure to leave your feedback there, and upvote what you like to see in the game (just please, no more sex stuff).

Also, for those who don't yet know, we have tutorials and short stories on our YouTube channel. I've been thinking about using it to create a series on official lore. Would you like to see the Soulash universe summarized and expanded into a video format? Make sure to subscribe and let us know.

Have fun slurping blood and turning your mush-family into vampires,

Artur