Hey all, It's been a long time, but version 0.18 is released! It features new content, bug fixes and improved stability of the game. If you want to get involved in future beta tests of new content, or just chat about Lost Flame, please join the official Discord server

Character Stat Progression

The update introduces stat progression that allows for more customizability for your character. Together with this, all weapons also got scaling stat describing how their damage increases based on specific stats. Each level you gain 1 soul shard, and every 4 levels starting from level 8 you get 4 soul shards. You can spend you soul shards at any point to increase one of 6 stats. Each stat grants different bonuses:

• Endurance - increases your stamina by 1
• Vigor - increases your hp by 1
• Consitution - increases your encumbrance capacity by 10%, increases elemental resists by 3%
• Strength - increases damage of weapons scaling with strength, increases poison resist by 3%, increases fist damage by 1
• Dexterity - increases to hit chance by 1%, increases damage of weapons scaling with dexterity
• Intelligence - increases attunement by 1 (and attunement increases power of evocations and increases all elemental damage dealt by 4%/point - includes, weapons, wands, evocations, etc.)

If you don't want to pigeonhole into any build, and want to stick to being defined by items you can just level up endurance and vitality, which has the same effect as previous leveling system. There is also a way to respec, but [spoiler]it requires crafting a scroll of amnesia by Violet Pepper from Iphe's essence[/spoiler]

Ivoryreach

If you look well enough, you will be able to find a new location accessible in the early parts of the game. The ivory white castle located near Silver Lake is pretty hard though (I would say around late Tower of Mirth difficulty-wise). The location is ice-centered and introduces around 10 new enemies, 2 new boss fights and opens up a few shortcuts around the kingdom of Hiraeth.

Inventory screen rework

The update introduces new inventory screen. Not much to say about this, here's how it looks:

Game ported to LibGDX game engine

The biggest effort was behind porting the game to LibGDX game engine. Previous versions of the game were using Slick2D, which is a legacy engine, which was not updated in 10 years. The engine had its issues, causing flickers, crashes and all kind of unexpected behaviours for some of the players, which were very difficult to trace and address. I've also had to modify parts of its code every now and then. LibGDX introduces better performance, hopefully much higher stability, much bigger community in case of any issues, and active team behind it that is updating it regularly. There are some missing things after the port, which I will readd as a hotfix within a week or so, notably:

• zoom/scaling option - if the tiles in game are too small for you - as a workaround change the resolution to a lower one
• using mouse wheel to browse through available skills - no clean work around for that

Other small new content

• game playable without numpad - using shift+arrow will move your character in the next direction clockwise to the arrow (e.g. shift+up arrow will move you up-right, shift+down will move you down-left)
• autoexplore will show you the list of seen stairs once the map is fully explored and you will be able to choose which one to go to
• autoexplore now allows you to navigate to pyres once whole level is explored
• Silver Lake Cavalier now deal ice damage instead of fire
• added 4 new achievements, and removed achievements related to weekly runs

QoL improvements

• explode flesh will no longer be cast in auto-fight mode
• right mouse button will now cancel selected action
• added more details to the armor tooltip in inventory (e.g. what kind of damage gets reduced and how much)
• fixed autoexplore in Hideout ignoring some "events"
• when crafting last possible item, the crafting menu will get autoclosed
• selection boxes (e.g. pyre travel, or NPC interaction) now scale their size based on the number of options
• bottle knight will autohide to bottle if his maximum stamina gets drained to less than 8
• when dying on mainland, the message will now show the current location, not "Mainland"
• added an icon for broken square bottle + a sound/text notifications when this happens

Bug fixes

• fixed amulet of wardship giving negative shield when having resistance greater than 100%
• fixed most of the situations where autoexplore would go into loop
• fixed mouse cursor sometimes not appearing in menu
• fixed Rising Tide attack markers displayed wrong
• ctrl+movement will be stopped if gating to/from Neith
• fixed some spelling mistakes
• when finishing a run, sometimes wrong run is highlighted on the leaderboard
• fixed not connected back stairs between Abysm 1 and Abysm 2 (forge variant of Abysm)
• fixed encumbrance showing 10x the value in post game character log
• fixed sounds sometimes getting stopped mid play
• fixed the path to Abysm from Monastery spawning incorrectly with shallow ("red") variant of Abysm
• fixed Rianne being able to disappear after getting killed sometimes
• fixed crash when going to Neith in Abysm
• stability and performance improvements

Balance changes

• higher cooldown to Fireball
• increased Rain of Molten Wax damage
• Wretched Brute - bigger delay before he attacks, and longer window to hit him between his invulnerability
• reduced cooldown for tumble for lower encumbrance while increased it for higher encumbrance
• reduced the teleport enemy skill range for soulless witches mainland (previously they were able to teleport you from Istimid to Secluded Courtyard, which usually meant you were a toast)
• ring of rocks now applies to fist attacks

Hope you have fun! Bartek