Boy I sure managed to keep up the weekly updates thing didn't I? So long story short the features that I wanted to add were all too large to finish in a week and all too interconnected to release in chunks, so instead you're getting an absolutely massive update. I'd brag that the filesize has increased 5 fold, but 71% of the new filesize is taken up with music, so I'm not sure that counts.

Major new features

It feels like I've been doing this update for so long that some of the 'new' features don't feel new to me any more, and things that I would have called 'major' two months ago no longer feel major. Chief among those is the new options screen. There was a button for it before, but it did what? Let you toggle the current state of fullscreen and also house the credits button? Now it's an actual options screen, with persistent options, doing all sorts, like tooltip delay, scale of some UI elements, volume, the expected stuff, but also things like adding a crosshair to the overworld map when it's moving or zooming, which may help if you suffer from motion sickness and those things trigger it.

Second among the not so new and not so major feeling features is an extras screen. It lets you access the wordle minigame that shrines use (more on that later), the item almanac, the stats screen, the credits (mostly open source stuff), but also gives access to debug tools I created to test new parallaxes and new sprites.

Final of the not so new, not so major features is the 'player' screen, which has changed like 4 times since the start of this update, and was originally just a place to house all the increasing number of buttons that were cluttering the overworld screen. It's still that, but now it feels more coherent, with tabs for the three inventories (more on that later), a tab to use some items in the overworld, but also a bit showing the details of your character, class, health, armour, and so on.

Character classes

Probably the most front facing of the new features is the fact that your character now has an actual representation; one of 8 visually customizable classes, and one uncustomizable class, who all have different starting gear and drop tables. In order shown, they are:

• Adventurer: Unlocked from the start.
• Warrior: Unlocked by playing the game.
• Mage: Unlocked by visiting a wizards tower.
• Assassin: Unlocked through specific choices during combat.
• Cultist: Unlocked through witnessing horrors.
• Demonkin: Unlocked through dealing with the horrors.
• Halfling.
• Paladin: Unlocked through an event.
• Priest: Not appearing in this version.
• Woodsman: Unlocked through an event.

If you load a save from V16, you'll be an adventurer. You'll also be almost completely white because while I had it define a default class, I forgot to have it load some default colours. If you're one of the 6 people this could affect. I'm sorry, you should probably start a new run anyway.

I never came up with a good idea for the priest, so while they have some things defined for them, and would 'technically' be playable (you could unlock them with save editing), they aren't animated and don't have a defined starting loadout.

The halfling is kinda a weird hard-mode meme class. I didn't want to encourage specifically encourage players to seek out playing as them, which is why the game never advertises when they become unlocked. They also aren't animated or customizable. That's semi related to the first point, but also because the animations I first tried looked weird and it was stressing me out, so I left it, and now I kinda think it's funny that they're just a weird child that just slides around unmoving. I'll deal with that next update. Probably.

Music

I mentioned this in the lead, and I don't have too much more to add about it, but It's a notable inclusion that I wanted to give it a section anyway so the people that just headline skim also take note. The music was written specially by my brother Connor Wheeldon. He has a day job and a life though, so he hasn't no-lifed it hardcore for the past several months like I have. His contribution is 2 battle musics, which will dynamically on-the-bar switch based on if you're fighting a boss or not, 4 overworld tracks, which will dynamically shift based on where you are in the world, and 6 musical stings for, winning, dying, resting, and more.

New gameplay mechanics

This probably isn't an exaustive list of the new mechanics, but this updates adds armour, passive abilities, passives that affect things you do in the overworld, the ability to increase your consumable carry count, the burn status, the ability to inflict status effects on enemies, status effects to give weakness-, resistance-, immunity-, and to make your armour defend against- bleed, toxin, and burn, gear that can be combined until you start a new character, enemies that can run away, areas that can have several minibosses instead of a fixed single area boss, bosses that can appear out of the normal order, exploding tiles, burning tiles, upgrades for tiles, and a new minigame.

Speaking of;

New minigame

It's wordle. The word length is a normal distribution between 4 and 7 with mean of 5.

You can play it endlessly from the extras screen on the main menu, or there's some persistent nodes on the map where you can play it with some story significance.

Oh right, yeah, there's also a story or something. I guess it's a big deal?

Story

The game now has something resembling a story, spoilers ahead: So if you make it to a level 4 or greater adventure area or if you read from the book of swears at a shrine, you cause a large area of the map to briefly catch fire, and weird altar made of spikes with a strange glow about it to appear on the map. When this happens it will also mark all the shrines on the map, and completing the minigame at each of them and either consecrating or desecrating will decide who you fight if you go to the altar and how powerful they aren't. You need the profane book; the book of swears; to have the option to desecrate a shrine. You could also go right to the altar and maybe get set on fire and unalive. The more shrines you do the thing at, the weaker the final fight will be. Assuming you don't half and half it at least. If you do a bunch of desecrating then the final fight will be paladins and other people instead of demons.

New UI elements

This is getting a bit scattershot now, and some new UI elements are listed elsewhere where relevant, but there's now UI elments showing a turn tracker, an enemy tracker, indication of item type on reward screens, indication when items are part of a crafting recipe, cost indications on buttons, a way to access the options screen from most places, a way to view your inventory from rewards screens, a button to clear the crafting grid if the things in the grid aren't a recipe, a button to toggle between drag-and-click selling, an inventort sort button, contextually relevant indications of your current health and gold in the overworld and during overworld events, proper player and enemy status indicators, death effect indicators, and probably more. Oh scroll buttons. A bunch of things also have scroll buttons now. There's also a little button dealy that appears in the corner of the map if you have nothing selected that selects and centres on your current location.

New items

This update adds 7 consumables, over 42 gear items, and 21 passives. This isn't counting different potion fill levels, or different mutually exclusive craft trees. I'm not going to list them all like I have in previous updates, because there's too many getting, and I also have the almanac in game now. I will however list that there are 4 items that are locked until you submit or try to submit specific words. Those words are QUOTH and NEVERMORE, OLEXA, BOOKWORM and LEX, and last POG. Not all of them are actually in the dictionary, so it wont accept all of them as words, but the game reacts to them. Also DOOT, but that doesn't come with an unlock.

New enemies

This update sees the return of the rainbow slime from V12, and also adds another slime variant, the lava slime! This doesn't sound like a lot of enemies, and it isn't. It's also not all of them. There's a goon enemy primarily from an event, there's events where you can potentially fight the paladin and the woodsman. You can fight demonkin and cultists later on in the story. If you go down a bad path in life you can find most of the rest of the character classes as enemies as well.

New parallaxes

The burned forest biome no longer appears naturally on the map, and instead appears in the place of regular forests when they get burned. There's also new parallaxes for pine forest, pine forest road, plains, plains road, and burned plains. There's also a test screen on the extras menu where you can cycle through them all.

Changes

This isn't exhaustive, by any means, but it's everything that I thought to document at the time that was a change to something that existed prior to this version.

• Demo version restrictions changed:
  • Only adventurer class is selectable.
  • It will now allow you to continue after 15 or more entries are in your stats.
  • It will now allow you to enter adventures higher than level 1.
  • It will quit if you attempt to enter an adventure after the 'big world event' has triggered.
  • Profane book doesn't drop (It was previously not included in some? demo versions.)
• Event screens now centre the buttons if there's no image.
  • Many events now have images.
• Reloading mid adventure now approximately recreates the line of 'remains'.
• Burned forest nodes no longer naturally appear, and require the forest to get burned first.
• Adjusted enemy balance:
  • Reduced damage of sword skeletons so 4 damage bosses in a level 1 dungeon is no longer common.
  • Bleed damage is calculated differently so that axe skeleton bosses are less likely to have entirely unthreatening-that-late bleed.
• The rings of four- and eight- sight now show future enemies on the adventure tracker.
• Options screen is now accessible from most places, via a button or esc.
• Overworld map screen now only shows health when at and selecting a campfire, village, or an incomplete adventure node.
• Overworld map screen now only shows gold when at and selecting a village, wizard tower, or the capital.
• Gear tab in adventures now shows all equipped instead of just the first 6.
• Unified exiting screens with back buttons on them, so they can all be left by pressing esc.
• Stats bar now only has 2 states of openness, and defaults to the more closed one.
• Unified character information displays, split status/attack/death effects, and added tooltips to all of them.
• Stats screen now has a slider for quickly navigating if you have a lot of entries.
• If you're using keyboard input for wildcards, it'll remember the key you pressed and check that first when scanning the dictionary.
• Stats now tracks and lists killed enemy types and gear.
• The spider warning event now stocks the medicated bandage instead of the bezoar if you've unlocked that.
• Tweaked the outline of the overworld area name text.
• Apothecary spider warning event is now a woodsman, and also unlocks that class.
• Stats now save more things when perma-recording.
• Main menu background now scales with resolutions better.
• Postgame screen will now show main stats as well if you died.
• The word board during adventures is now slightly transparent.
• Empty potion bottles now move to the end of your inventory on activate instead of getting deleted.
• Monstrous jade idol now gives a special gold-bordered tile or better if it's a miniboss.
• Potion of toxin resistance no longer stacks with itself, but does still stack with gear that does the same.
• Spiders now drop slightly less money.
• Dying adventurer event is now a dying paladin, and has been fleshed out.
• Events now contextually show current health and/or gold.
• Item reward screen now has a link to your inventory.
• Added gradients to the edges of the adventure view so that ultrawide screens don't have a hard cut off.
• Gold effect on crafting screen is now in front of other elements.
• Godrays now pulsate.
• Lights from the torches in the dungeon now flicker and have particle effects.
• Adventure graphics are now 'pixel perfect'.
• Numerous screens now have a blurry underlay of the previous screen/another specific screen.
• Centre-screen-on function on map is now smooth instead of snapping

Fixes

This section would be way longer, but as with the changes I avoided documenting things if they were bugs introduced during the development of V17. If I ever make the git commit log public, you'd see that the number of commits for just V17 is greater than the number of commits for everything before then.

• Fixed dying adventurer event being unable to trigger.
• Map particle effects now scale correctly with zoom.
• Stats page now refreshes when you open it in case you did something since last opening.
• World generation will now delete nodes that fail to connect.
  • This fixes the capital being in the ocean on world seed 397.
• World generation no longer makes really long connections that it doesn't need to.
  • This removes a road that was almost map length on world seed 856, but can leave regular nodes behind secret nodes.
• Fixed item tooltips flickering when the mouse moves.
• Fixed a crash if a world generates with more than 17 villages.
• Merchant events will no longer roll the exact same.
• Fixed the merchant event that can sell random gear items not being able to trigger.
• Fixed crafting cleanup happening after saving, which would cause garbage items to be left behind if the player quit before triggering another save.
• Fixed being able to buy obsolete gear items if it was a fixed item in the store.
  • This wasn't a possible situation in v16, and only affected Bezoar as sold by the spider warning event.
• Fixed the adventure stats bar not correctly tracking if it was closed because the player closed it, and opening without a good reason.
  • A good reason being you asked for a hint, and it needs to open to show the hint to you.
• Fixed the player moving like a hovercraft on the overworld.
• Fixed dragging the map while an event triggers causing it to miss the mouse-release event and being in drag state after the event.
• Fixed enemies after the required part of an adventure losing base stats if you closed and reloaded while they were alive.
  • This notably included attack values and gold drop values.
• Fixed empty antiserum not listing correctly.
• Fixed the tileboard queue not clearing between instances, leading to duplicated tiles.
• Fixed shop RNG seed being functionally the same.
• Fixed a save happening while the board isn't completely full resulting in the tiles loading in bunched to the left.
• Fixed the typo 'burried' in the adventurer event.
• Fixed a typo in the woodsman event; using 'by' instead of 'buy'.
• Fixed tile tooltips sticking around if they were removed while showing the tip.
• Fixed a softlock in the buy-random-gear event.
• Fixed activating a scroll after inputting the magic word not updating the attack button visuals. (Effect was still correct)