Hey everyone,
Since 0.20.1 I’ve rebuilt most of the game’s menus and UI, replaced hundreds of placeholder icons with beautiful new pixel artwork by Bladimir (aka imkingsfool), added a proper character creation screen, and turned imprisonment from a dialogue box into an actual place you can escape from.
There are many bug fixes and community suggestions in here too, which you can find in detail below.
Thanks, as always, to everyone who sent saves, screenshots and bug reports as part of the playtest. The game is coming along in leaps and bounds thanks to your efforts, and I've added some credits down below as well.
Tim
The big stuff6
- Getting arrested now puts you in a real settlement lock-up. You can walk around the cell, sleep off your sentence, pay the fine, bribe the gaoler, or try the bent spoon somebody thoughtfully left on the floor. Break out and the town will treat you accordingly.
- Character creation has been rebuilt from scratch. You can see your character, starting equipment and standing before you choose, and every origin now starts with the kit its description promises.
- The Going Rogue introduction is now a short illustrated sequence instead of a wall of text.
- Menus and panels now share one consistent style, with proper close buttons, key hints and scrollbars. This includes Settings, the pause menu, Records, Achievements, the Homestead Ledger, the Post Office, the Traders’ Exchange and most of the smaller panels.
- The interface copes much better with 720p windows, Steam Deck, large text, controllers and touch. When space gets tight, the message log and toolbar now shrink sensibly instead of covering other controls.
- Wheels of War has had a full visual overhaul, with new painted pieces and much livelier feedback.
Autosave and old worlds5
- Fixed autosave not writing to disk in 0.20.1 and earlier. It now completes within two seconds of becoming due instead of waiting forever for an idle moment that never came.SamVDr_Bicinium
- If an autosave fails, the game retries later instead of silently disabling autosave for the rest of the session.
- Existing Crossings now keep their original layout. A world-generation change could move towns or run a river through an established homestead; older worlds are now locked to the generation they were created with.
- Chopped trees and saplings no longer leave hidden data behind or grow back through something you built in their place.
- Built cheese caves, signs and other player changes survive leaving the area and returning.horth.panthurthesquirrel_74982
Exploring the world8
- Higher-tier dungeons start much closer to the early game: the first step up is now roughly 1,200 tiles from a starting village instead of 2,200.
- Innkeepers, scholars and guards can point you towards the next tier of dungeon, and the world map marks it for you.Entloch
- Every hub village now has a waystone. New Crossings get them too; existing worlds keep their old geography.Entloch
- Death piles no longer expire. The world map shows each one with a skull and can start a journey back to your gear. If the pile is inside a dungeon, it waits safely at the entrance.Hlord
- Pressing Travel while already on a journey now changes your destination instead of asking you to choose a waypoint again.theartolater
- Automatic travel gives a reason when it stops, routes around ordinary town obstacles, and stops when an eclipse begins.
- Woodland areas that had no reachable stone now get a small outcrop.darthoddish
- Launching a boat into a pond no longer packs the boat away as if you had reached open water.
Cheese and spellcasting10
- The Recipe Book now explains the full spell-cheese process: which curd, flora and press a recipe needs, how long it takes, and which ingredients you already have.
- Arcane Rennet is stocked by every cheese merchant, at every tier.
- Cheese workers can teach your first wheel if you know a spell recipe but have never pressed one.
- All sixteen cheese cultures are now obtainable, including Moonculture from the Moon Hare on a full moon.
- Cheese ageing now follows the calendar. Better wheels take longer, last much longer, and sell for more. Existing wheels keep the ageing time they started with.
- Reserve Cellars now clearly explain that they keep your wheel, age it and pay Reserve Marks. A finished wheel is labelled “ready to collect”.
- Four Season Wheels can be made from Legendary flora and aged underground for powerful permanent rewards.
- Veil of Voidstruck and Arcane Pinnacle can finally be learned.
- The forge can age Monadic Descent relics and can use a catalyst from a nearby chest.
- A padlocked stack is now protected from automatic use by taming, companion feeding, shrine offerings, quest hand-ins and the forge.arkhaven
Art, inventory and HUD8
- Added an eight-slot Quick Bar for usable items and actions. Click to use a slot; right-click an item or bind it through the Panel Hub to add it.
- The Wheel Belt carries your first eight war cheeses, while the Tool Roll carries a hatchet, pickaxe and fishing rod. Neither takes backpack space.
- Added real pixel art for 235 items and spells from the Clockwork Raven packs, plus 122 UI and creature slots that previously showed a letter or no image at all.
- Perks, upgrades and keystones now use Bladimir’s pixel art, recoloured to suit each card.Bladimir
- Eight new submissions from the Discord pixel-art team are now in the game: the crystal golem, jungle god, a new revenant, spider and phase spider, plus three new terrain tiles. The spider’s blink was redrawn to match its new side-on sprite.Roguefort Discord pixel-art team
- The Items panel, notice board, Terroir screen and other long lists behave properly at large text sizes and remember their scroll position..scarletfanrubberychicken
- Critical chance is now calculated and displayed consistently across the HUD and character sheets.rubberychicken
- Temporary Health appears above Rinded, matching the order damage is actually taken.rubberychicken
Animals and companions8
- Beast handlers are back in towns and cities, and in most villages.Dr_Bicinium
- Tamed animals can be released instead of being kept forever.
- Come here calls your companion to your side, and companions now path around walls instead of deciding they are already close enough.Dr_Bicinium
- Pet all handles a full party in one press.
- Stay back now really means stay back; companions no longer wander into the fight or intercept attacks from the position they were told to hold.datsheeptho
- Led livestock queue through narrow passages instead of blocking one another.thesquirrel_74982
- Taming only spends a rope when you choose Tame, and recipes can use any suitable hide instead of requiring a randomly encountered deer.
- Cooked meat and food on the Quick Bar can be used as bait.
Towns, NPCs and co-op8
- Towns and cities can grow again. A village population cap had accidentally been applied everywhere, leaving larger settlements able to shrink but never recover.
- A co-op partner now keeps the settlement around them active, even when the host is somewhere else.
- Far-shore villagers can talk about events from their own shore’s generated history.
- Townsfolk route around each other better in narrow streets and no longer repeatedly calculate impossible commutes.
- Farmers stop taking over plots you built, and settlement graves will not appear on top of player construction.
- NPCs identify cities as cities instead of calling every settlement a town.
- Shops belong to the trader who runs them, rather than whichever resident happens to be standing nearby.
- Indirectly killing a townsperson now carries the same consequences as killing them directly, and dead quest givers no longer pay their own bounties.
Fixes and polish14
- Fixed surface movement hitching while the game searched for spawn locations.SamV
- Fixed Linux builds sometimes opening to a black window. The game now attempts a redraw, rebuild or safe-mode relaunch and saves before the more disruptive recovery steps. It also keeps the display awake while playing.Dr_BiciniumHONEY BADGER
- Fixed achievements that had conditions but could never trigger, including most of the vampire arc and seven Crossing achievements.
- Fixed leaving a dungeon counting as tens of thousands of tiles walked and repeatedly offering the same level-up perk.
- Fixed paid perk rerolls offering a card that was already on the table.
- Fixed sale-gold popups using a different colour and multiple gold popups stacking on top of one another.
- Fixed a fire-warded vampire being told that sunlight hurt them when no damage was taken.
- Fixed vendors occasionally listing the same item twice.
- Fixed empty bookshelves still drawing books, murdered villagers appearing to drop meat, and waterskins merging into invalid stacks.
- Fixed the player, menus, full backpacks, gathering, locks, crafting and revives missing their intended sound effects. A Mute option has also been added to Audio settings.
- Fixed 2.5D movement drifting off-grid, attacks swinging in the wrong direction, spell effects lying flat, night becoming unreadably dark, and dungeon floors rendering as bright violet.
- Houses have roofs in 2.5D again, rain no longer turns the ground into a checkerboard, and doors and windows no longer flash solid as you walk past.
- Fishing respects doors, windows, backpack capacity and the water you are actually standing on. Driftwood gives wood, river trout stay in rivers, and the level-up message appears on the correct catch.rubberychicken
- Coastal settlements now generate on land instead of partly in the sea. Unvisited coastal towns in existing worlds repair themselves when loaded.trespiratesque
Known issues4
- Only the Monadic Descent is open. The Dyadic Vault, Triadic Gate and Tetradic Keep are still sealed.
- Adjacent carpets still appear as separate rugs in 2.5D.
- Tilt-shift depth of field remains disabled on Steam Deck and software graphics because of the performance cost.
- A small number of dungeon floors can still generate with an area cut off from the stairs.
Credits3
- Reports, saves, suggestions and playtest feedback: scarletfan, aj01657, arkhaven, bossman62, darthoddish, datsheeptho, Dr_Bicinium, elanto, elfietheesp55, Entloch, Hlord, horth.panthur, HONEY BADGER, iso5455, nalathnidragon, niceypoo, rubberychicken, SamV, sksniperks, soeshii, theartolater, thesquirrel_74982, and trespiratesque.
- New card art: Bladimir (imkingsfool on fiverr.com)
- New creature and terrain sprites: the Roguefort Discord pixel art team.