Welcome to "Runekeeper", the biggest update to date!

If you have been following along through the updates and newsletters, you will know that through many iterations and scraped ideas, we finally have a replacement for reputation: creature territories. Creatures and difficulty will increase as you move out into different parts of the island or travel to new ones. You can also modify this system slightly using a new mechanic involving runes and deities (there's a mini spoiler in the new trailer below). Be free, and play however you want now without having to worry about managing your reputation! Share your thoughts on this new system or on any of the other changes we put out this time around. It's a big one! We also have a new trailer for 2024/2025 (it's close enough, right?). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arpFIS7cXHs

Some stand-out features this time around include:

Creatures now have simplistic "territories" creatures near your spawn point are now easier than creatures far away, and creatures will stay in their original areas more often.
You have attracted the attention of multiple unknown forces deities. As you survive and make decisions, these deities will award you with tokens in their likeness. Invoke them, and in turn, receive their blessing.
You can now "stack" and "unstack" like items. Item stacks display as if they are the first item in the stack (respecting your sort), with a quantity of how many total items are in the stack. You can press "ctrl" to temporarily expand the stack your mouse is over.
Added wheelbarrows, allowing you to push and pull additional storage.
Added armor stands, allowing you to store armor and weapon sets visually with the ability to quick-swap certain builds.
You can now right-click on any visible location to perform actions there, your character will automatically walk to wherever they need to.
Added a new action bar that gets filled with context menu action history as you play.
Merchant trading has been redesigned.
The full [strike]novel[/strike] changelog can be read through below:

New

• Creatures now have simplistic "territories" creatures near your spawn point are now easier than creatures far away, and creatures will stay in their original areas more often.
• You have attracted the attention of multiple unknown forces deities. As you survive and make decisions, these deities will award you with tokens in their likeness. Invoke them, and in turn, receive their blessing.
• You can now "stack" and "unstack" like items. Item stacks display as if they are the first item in the stack (respecting your sort), with a quantity of how many total items are in the stack. You can press "ctrl" to temporarily expand the stack your mouse is over.
• Added wheelbarrows, allowing you to push and pull additional storage.
• Added armor stands, allowing you to store armor and weapon sets visually with the ability to quick-swap certain builds.
• You can now right-click on any visible location to perform actions there, your character will automatically walk to wherever they need to.
• Added a new action bar that gets filled with context menu action history as you play.
• Merchant trading has been redesigned.
• The stats layout has been reworked, associating status effects with their related stats and providing stat names.
• Added primitive musical instruments that can be used to command multiple creatures at a time.
• Added a tamed status icon above tamed creatures.
• There is now a visual on the depth when digging.
• Added a new option to make action slots be used on the tile you're mousing over.
• Status effect iconography has been redesigned, allowing players to more easily know at a glance how threatening a new effect is.
• The actions drawer now supports selecting a specific item type from a list of all discovered item types, and selecting a range of qualities.
• Added "Thaumaturgic", a new milestone and modifier for finding every type of magical property.
• All containers now have a "dump contents" action.
• Added bindings for toggling whether individual static UI components are visible (like the action bar, messages, etc.) These bindings are not set by default.
• Added animal cartilage, and new food recipes/food preservation through the use of gelatin crafted from cartilage or shark fins.
• Ice and puddles (on certain terrain) are now slippery and will cause slippery movement for players (with certain footwear) and some creatures, more so if jumped upon.
• Added a binding for toggling whether all auto-use action slots are enabled.
• Added conifer resins, pitch, and glue for use in new recipes and reinforcing.
• Added a new magical property "persistence" which increases max item durability far beyond normal means among other bonuses.
• Magical Binding now has a new action and use involving attack and defense bonuses.
• Added the Afflicted and Exsanguinated milestones.
• You can now set an action slot to "Use Hovered Item", allowing you to set up slots to quickly use actions on hovered items.
• Status effect tooltips have been completely redesigned, providing more information and presenting it more clearly.
• Added a new "shadowy" creature.
• Added a permanent notifier for when creatures are alerted, red exclamation point for hostile, yellow for scared.
• You can now set maxed skills as your in-game title.
• Added a "heel" or "follow, but don't attack" command for tamed creatures.
• Ranged actions can now be used at any angle.
• All container dialogs throughout the game (your inventory, held containers, container doodads, vehicles, NPCs) have been ported to the new UI system, fixing some longstanding issues and improving performance.
• All stats are now inspectable, providing general information on how the stat works, along with new information such as their related core stat and the skills you can use to improve them.
• Added a new stat "potency" equipped magical property that increases the bonuses that items provide when used.
• Added a new milestone & modifier "Statistician" for discovering the stats that each skill can raise.
• Added a new custom game option for disabling scared creature mechanics.
• Added a new type of skeleton with unique item drops that can appear from skeletal remains based on the current zone/tier.
• Added crucibles, a new device for smelting ores.
• Added a bindable to "Toggle Tooltips Visible", with no bindings by default. (Thanks Hiran!)
• Added the "Runekeeper" milestone and modifier.
• Added luck, a new stat affecting chances. There are not many places where luck currently takes effect, nor many things that modify luck this will be expanded on later.
• There is a new custom creature spawn rate multiplier option that will allow you to scale the rate at which creatures spawn including disabling it altogether.
• Added a custom game option to enable viewing container dialogs for the items on the tile you're facing.
• Added an audio cue when encumbered or overburdened.
• Added sandstone arrows and arrowheads.
• The chance to craft mastercrafted items is now revealed at 100% skill.
• Added a "Skip Quest" button to the Starter Quest.
• The skills dialog now displays skill icons & can be resized to display multiple columns.
• Added a rare, secret challenge modifier.
• Added eggshells (for chicken and penguin eggs), a new form of compost.
• Added a challenge modifier for starting at sunset.
• Added a new challenge modifier "Cursed!"
• There are now modifiers in challenge mode for spawning in other biomes.
• Added a multiplayer option to pause the server when desync occurs.
• Added a Steam beta dropdown to developer options.
• Added a setting to disable item notifiers.
• Added stripped leather, a new high-tier cordage.
• Each island now progresses or "ticks" independently.
• Minecarts can now push other minecarts. The faster the tier of minecart, the more minecarts can be pushed.
• Added an automatically updating notice when launching the development branch of the game.
• Added several new sound effect variations around inventory management.
• Added a new milestone, "Curator" for discovering every item quality.
• Added the "Dedicated" milestone and milestone modifier, allowing players to set one that raises faster than all others, while the rest raise very slowly.
• Added "gamemoderun" support.
• Added OLED burn-in protection for HUD/UI elements.
• Added a new help article about "Item Protection".
• Added two new milestones and modifiers to do with creature spawn rates.
• The "Move All" and "Move All of Quality" actions can now be bound to the action bar.
• Added notifiers when dual-wielding is enabled/disabled.
• Added fish bones and glue.
• You can now drag actions from context menus to the action bar.
• Added two new books.
• Added aberrant versions of all fish.

Improvements

• Tamed creatures now smartly follow you through cave entrances.
• The "Path to Tile: Preview" bindable has been removed in favor of it working automatically based on the modifiers of the "Path to Tile" bindable. IE, if you have "Path to Tile" set to "Shift + Click", it will automatically show the path preview on "Shift."
• Doodads used in crafts can now receive the "Aptitude" magical property.
• The "Grab All" button has been changed to a "Move All" button on all dialogs, transferring to the current quick-move target.
• The "Best for Crafting" sort is now more accurately calculated to include "Aptitude" items. (Thanks Andrej27!)
• There is now a chance for looted bags/backpacks to contain some items.
• Each item will now have an associated skill (or skills) so that actions taken upon it (like refining) will use a more closely related skill. (Thanks DragonOvLeaves!)
• Players will no longer be woken up from rest/sleep if the player around them can't actually get to them.
• Added a visual for "over-fished" tiles.
• The default control for idle is now "." and "Spacebar" now opens the action menu for the facing tile. (Thanks muzzy!)
• The default bind for toggling auto-use on an action slot has been changed to CTRL + Space instead of just ALT (to prevent accidental hover inputs).
• Reworked trapdoor spider AI. They are no longer hidden by default, instead choosing locations to hide in. They no longer move while hidden, and will sometimes come out of hiding to go somewhere else.
• Civilization score is now done per zone in addition to the whole island, impacting the creature spawning of individual areas in the island.
• Reimplemented the "Uses:" list for item tooltips, reducing noise and improving visual consistency.
• Fire now has a chance to produce particle effects when damaging doodads or items.
• "Reference links" in the game's text, such as the hoverable links to items, creatures, doodads, skills, etc, now display a new "help" cursor to indicate that they are clickable for more information.
• Random creature movement has been reworked to feel less random and more like creatures deciding to move to specific places.
• You can now see the stack of tiles when inspecting them.
• Attack stats in tooltips now display values for main-hand and off-hand use. (Thanks Andrej27!)
• Renamed all "Toggle X" actions to "X or Y", for example, "Toggle Container" is now "Open or Close Container."
• Individual stats are now discovered for new players as they progress through the game.
• You can now disable the warning when attempting to gather from plants with no resources. (Thanks Hiran!)
• You can now disable the game playing audio in the background. (Thanks Kowalth!)
• The item that an action slot will use is now displayed on the action slot. Action slots set to use the "best item" show a star above the action.
• Spawned creatures from items will now have some despawn protection. (Thanks DragonOvLeaves!)
• The Steam overlay is now more consistently implemented and will no longer report itself working in some cases where it did not.
• The various "Drop on Action" gameplay settings now support the "Drop into Containers" option.
• Tamed creatures now move around less when near the player/not busy with another task.
• Deep holes will allow water to be routed 100% of the time.
• Players with high taming skills can see the exact turn count when creatures untame at.
• You can now see how many times you've tamed or petted a tamed creature.
• All previous mechanics involving reputation (such as claw worm spawning, treasure chest creature difficulty, and creature spawning in general) are now based on the zone's tier you are in.
• Tooltip headers have been redesigned to improve consistency and user experience between them.
• The "Range" and "Attack" that are specified in tooltips for weapons/tools will now update dynamically based on skill.
• When two items have the same effective tier for an action, instead of choosing the one of higher quality as the "best" item, the game now chooses the item with the higher base action tier (ie, the action tier when the item is normal quality), due to the base being higher implying that the item is better suited for the action. (Thanks riftborn!)
• Stat gain messages now display the skill that caused them to raise.
• The Doctor milestone modifier has been reworked into something a bit more interesting.
• When a creature is regenerating or healing from a damage type and they are already at maximum health, it will now show a +0 (instead of -0).
• There are now actions for moving the contents of containers (in both doodad & item form) between containers and to your inventory.
• Petting will now also increase the creature's maximum health (to a much lesser extent than re-taming/offering).
• Shippers will now spawn closer to lit lighthouses.
• Drawn maps are no longer stocked on merchants. (Thanks Dewred!)
• The Doctor milestone has been reworked to now be a discovery milestone and requires discovering all possible cures. Its information is displayed in status tooltips.
• Added a dedicated, toggleable option for "Disable Modifier Unlock Requirements" that is not locked behind Developer Mode, so players that don't want content locked behind milestones don't have to use a developer option to mark them all as completed.
• Lava is now lit with a darker shade of orange/red.
• Resting or sleeping will no longer reset hunger/thirst timers so they immediately tick down after one turn while resting/sleeping.
• Added an option to disable the quit confirmation in cases where save data would not be lost.
• Dismantling hide now uses the "Leatherworking" skill instead of "Tailoring".
• Tweaked and made consistent the color of bone items.
• Added an animation to the "till" and "pack ground" actions. (Thanks riftborn!)
• Dripstones and stills now have variable turns taken for desalination based on type.
• Multiplayer "Error code 2" now reveals the issue and potential fix for the user and/or server admin.
• The snow scarecrow will now leave behind non-meltable items when melted.
• When an item with a colored border (ie, by quality or by it nearly being destroyed or decayed) is highlighted, the border now is a brighter version of the normal color. (Thanks muzzy!)
• Fishing a tile that cannot support any fish or items will now say so (instead of saying overfished).
• Gathering no longer automatically picks up items.
• Mud is now spawned around swamps and will be located under swamp tiles when dug.
• Trapdoor spiders and claw worms now produce holes when revealed or spawned.
• Protection now persists through building and picking up items, for example, building a sailboat, riding it, and then picking it back up.
• Discovering an item of a new quality now displays a celebratory message.
• Items of undiscovered qualities on the ground now appear as the closest discovered quality instead of a "?"
• When tiles are referenced in messages/tooltips, they will now show their quality, magical status, renamed names and more.
• The "Replay" button will now reset turn modes and multiplayer options.
• Added tooltips for all buttons on the action bar.
• Menu sections are now highlighted when scrolled to via a section button.
• Damage notifier icons are now shown on heavily damaged items when thrown or fired on the tile instead of above the player.
• Dripstones and stills now show a purification counter in their tooltip.
• Rewrote the "not suitable to plant" message so that it makes sense when trying to plant a coconut. (Thanks Shim Panz!)
• Equipped lit torches now provide heat.
• Swapping positions with creatures no longer causes an extra delay.
• Reduced the chance of merchants saying they had new stock after they already equipped or consumed it.
• Creatures will now keep a total of how many pets they have received which will impact (in addition to times tamed) command unlocks, taming chances, and more.
• Added a new "leaves" group which goats will now accept.
• "Drop All" and "Move All" action slot actions now use what is filtered in the player's inventory.
• Move/drop all binds and actions no longer move/drop equipped items.
• To help the user experience working through a quest line, "Next Quest:" buttons are now pinned to messages, ensuring that the player views the quest text as their pinned quest requirements update.
• The same item(s) can be traded back and forth several times between a merchant and a player at a cost penalty.
• Organic tiles will now always provide static resources when dug to better conform with doodads/plant resources. (Thanks DanekJovax!)
• Protected items that can't be used in crafting and dismantling will no longer be counted in the crafting/dismantle tooltip. (Thanks Feral Grumpicorn!)
• Changed some default action binds away from WASD keys, for example, Dismantle and Disassemble which caused many accidental actions.
• Multiple random items sourced from the same milestone modifier or challenge modifier into the same container are no longer duplicates.
• Some items are now excluded for random item milestone modifiers.
• Added a "Days" or "Nights" counter to the ferocity tooltip/inspection.
• The message log now supports infinite scroll, loading additional messages as necessary.
• The message log no longer forcibly keeps you at the latest message if you're trying to look at earlier messages. Scrolling back down to the latest message locks the scroll there again.
• The message log has been reimplemented for performance.
• Action slots no longer automatically switch to "best item" until you attempt to use the slot a second time. (Thanks muzzy!)
• Efficacy, success, quality chances and percentages are no longer shown when not meeting the requirements (as they were not accurate).
• The "worth" magical property now has a greater range of values possible.
• Magical doodads and bookcases that grant skill bonuses are now shown in the skill tooltips. (Thanks DanekJovax!)
• Killing creatures via traps, tamed creatures, or fire now provides the correct loot quality bonuses. (Thanks Art Shrival!)
• The "Hide Equipped Headgear" option now hides your equipped headgear for other players too (only if PVP is disabled.)
• You can now cage untamed creatures which uses the trapping skill and the creature's difficulty as a chance modifier.
• Cages now have different action tiers based on type/quality.
• Creatures now have an innate "worth" when caged to be used for trading and other purposes.
• Fires will now be more visible on tiles that contain items. (Thanks DerSimon!)
• Advancing island turns is now nearly instant at the cost of accuracy.
• Grabbing or clicking on an item from a container no longer makes the container active, allowing you to use the item "quick-move" feature between containers.
• Desktop users of Steam Deck will now be able to do normal desktop functions like toggling fullscreen mode and exporting local save files. (Thanks Geschrieben!)
• "Swords" are now referred to as "short swords".
• "Leather Hide" is now just "Hide" and "Tanned Leather" is now just "Leather".
• Void now displays as a separate unique graphic in maps.
• Health vignetting no longer shows in screenshot mode.
• Being hit additional times while delayed no longer increases your delay further.
• Added a message for when pouring water on a creature/player had no effect.
• Puddles now provide audio/visual cues when stepped on.
• "Enable Smooth Zooming" is now disabled when "Disable Movement Animations" is enabled.
• Piles of rocks now use the "mine" action instead of "chop" as their tool-based gather action.
• Container dialogs are no longer closed and reopened when changing state, such as when picking up a chest, or boarding/dismounting vehicles. The sort & sort direction now also persist between the states.
• The optional smooth zoom animation is now curved, starting fast and slowing down near the end, to make it feel better to use.
• Doodads that will be destroyed on pick-up will now warn you. (Thanks riftborn!)
• Picking up any vehicle will now only damage them by 1 instead of their damage multiplier.
• Improved support for slow multiplayer connections.
• You can now use the mouse to organize all items of a type or quality within a single container.
• You can now navigate backward and forward through your Inspect dialog inspection history.
• You can now sort skills by "recent".
• The milestones dialog now displays milestone icons & can be resized to display multiple columns.
• Added particle effects to crafting/dismantling/disassembling actions with colors based on the item.
• NPCs will now prefer to attack their attacker instead of the nearest player.
• "Animal Glue" is now "Bone Glue" and will only require bones instead of bones and offal.
• The "Keep Sort Active" option has been replaced with simply persisting the selected sort in containers. When manually reordering items, the sort changes to display "Custom" instead of a sort, as no sort is active anymore.
• The doodad version of "skill" magical properties will now have an "encircling" affix.
• Doodads that block the line of sight will now illuminate their surrounding tiles properly when on fire. (Thanks muzzy!)
• Some milestones are now hidden entirely until you complete previous milestones, to make the milestones dialog a bit less overwhelming. (IE Survivor reveals Weathered reveals Seasoned.)
• New items were added to the challenge mode's "get item" quests.
• Options for the action bar are now accessible via a new button alongside the "+" and "-" buttons.
• Improved the performance of displaying non-craftable items, and of dimming out irrelevant items in containers when one or more are highlighted.
• Improved performance of tooltips.
• Orb of Influence has been renamed to "Cracked Orb" to be used as a new magical component for unlocking the "alter" action.
• The "active container" highlight is now a tab on the side of containers. You can click the tab to manually set the active container instead of using the container the game thinks is best.
• The "open container" action now makes the container active if it's already open.
• "Copal" has been removed and replaced with "Hide Glue" with similar uses/efficacy.
• Updated "A Powdery Catalog" book. (Thanks Feral Grumpicorn!)
• When building or picking up containers, the container dialog now stays open.
• The skills and milestones dialogs now save their sort options when reloading the game. (Thanks !)
• The "days" shown on server details now are a cumulative total and average respectively across all islands.
• NPCs can no longer spawn within the line of sight of a player.
• "Dig With Hands" is no longer available on piles of rocks or other doodads. (Thanks muzzy!)
• Changed the "Rest" action to auto-use only when you have the "tired" status effect.
• "Gather With Hands" now has a description.
• Trampling fire now produces messages for partial/failure events.
• Equipment slots and action slots can now be inspected with the Inspect dialog.
• The islands dialog now displays waves as decorations between the islands.
• Updated the appearance of the weight tooltip.
• You will now receive a warning when overwatering small plants. (Thanks Ze!)
• Holding alt while slotting an item or action in the action bar now slots it with auto-use enabled.
• Container weight is now revalidated on reload (for save compatibility). (Thanks Veeyu!)
• NPCs will now attempt to move off of dangerous tiles.
• The "dangerous" creature tier has been renamed to "vicious" to differentiate it from the "danger level" mechanic.
• You can now sort milestones by "recent".
• Puddles now decay faster if walked on, but last a bit longer by default.
• Action slots containing an item now highlight when the mouse is over the item in your inventory.
• Useful item hover binds are now described in the inventory management help article.
• Your carry & max weight are now displayed in your inventory dialog with a tooltip.
• Updated some old references in the help articles.
• You can now click on most tooltip links to open that tooltip in the "Inspect" dialog, rather than needing to press shift+right click in all cases.

Looks like we ran out of room! Steam doesn't support a changelog this big. To view the full thing, head on over to the blog post.

[ 2024-12-14 18:01:11 CET ] [ Original post ]