Sands of Salzaar News

The newest update for Sands of Salzaar is now live! This update introduces a major redesign of the town infiltration mechanic, addresses difficulty option related issues introduced by our last update, and contains a number of main story bugfixes, you can read the patch notes further down below.

You can also find a list of known major issues and potential workarounds here.

As always, if you encounter any issue, please join us on our Discord server and let us know, this is the fastest way to get feedback directly to us, so we highly encourage you to do so!



[h3]2020-09-28 Codename: Battle of the Black Sun (0.8.0.4)[/h3]

Additions

• Redesigned town infiltration mechanics. You can now try to sneak in during day time, but with much lower success rate. Your chance of success is tied to your party size, the more people you try to sneak in with, the less likely you'll succeed. A failed infiltration will trigger a small scale skirmish with guards, defeat them to continue your infiltration.
  
• Added 4 new urban battle environments.

Bugfixes

• The Sultan can now properly upgrade the Sawmill.
  
• Pre 0.8.0.3 saves (before we changed the prerequisite for the difficulty select function) now automatically adds 1 difficulty level a shortwhile after loading.
  
• Fixed an issue causing The Nameless's Arcane Portal to be able to access the Ifrit town earlier than intended.
  
• Fixed an issue preventing players from talking to Husnu after helping the Nasir defeat all other tribes.
  
• Fixed a rare issue preventing players from progressing the main story after defeating all five tribes.
  
• Fixed an issue causing certain skills to become unlearnable in the Book of Fire quest.
  
• Players can now talk to the Ifrit mother again after interacting with the fruit first.
  
• The Ifrit towns now have more building variety other than Caster Watchtowers.

Adjustments

• (Multiplayer) Improved bare handed attack speed and adjusted attack range.
  
• (Multiplayer) Improved attack speed for sword, knife, spear, hammer and boardsword weapons. Adjusted their attack range and added new visual effect.
  
• (Multiplayer) Improved attack speed for bow and sub weapons.
  
• You can now pay the Sultan of a tribe that has you wanted to call off the contract without needing to talk to the leader.
  
• Chaka of Limestone Village now has a specialty gift item.

We are releasing another update soon, this update addresses difficulty option related issues introduced by our last update, and a number of main story bugfixes, you can read the patch notes below.

You can also find a list of known major issues and potential workarounds here.

As always, if you encounter any issue, please join us on our Discord server and let us know, this is the fastest way to get feedback directly to us, so we highly encourage you to do so!



[h3]2020-09-27 Codename: Battle of the Black Sun (0.8.0.4)[/h3]

Preliminary, may include additional changes once the update goes live.

Bugfixes

• The Sultan can now properly upgrade the Sawmill.
  
• Pre 0.8.0.3 saves (before we changed the prerequisite for the difficulty select function) now automatically adds 1 difficulty level a shortwhile after loading.
  
• Fixed an issue causing The Nameless's Arcane Portal to be able to access the Ifrit town earlier than intended.
  
• Fixed an issue preventing players from talking to Husnu after helping the Nasir defeat all other tribes.
  
• Fixed a rare issue preventing players from progressing the main story after defeating all five tribes.
  
• Fixed an issue causing certain skills to become unlearnable in the Book of Fire quest.
  
• Players can now talk to the Ifrit mother again after interacting with the fruit first.
  
• The Ifrit towns now have more building variety other than Caster Watchtowers.

Adjustments

• Pressing F5 (default quick save hotkey) now automatically saves the game to the autosave slot without having to click the save game dialogue.
  
• Improved bare handed attack speed and adjusted attack range.
  
• Improved attack speed for sword, knife, spear, hammer and boardsword weapons. Adjusted their attack range.

Dear desert travelers,

Since the launch of the English localization edition, we’ve been receiving lots of attention, kind support, and feedback from our players worldwide, among which we notice that many of you are asking about the English mod support.

Currently, the English Mod Editor is still under testing but fully open to our modders. Our devs are working on fine-tuning English modding tools and updating the mod developer manual. In the meantime, we hope to encourage our players to take a shot at creating some English mods, which will help the devs better troubleshoot potential modding problems as well as bring new energy to our global modding community.



[h2]Special Modding Event #2[/h2]
During the first Sands of Salzaar Modding Event in May, our incredible modders fully unleashed their power of creativity and imagination, developing a variety of inspiring mods. This time, we decided to open the second Special Modding Event to players worldwide, encouraging our English players to get started on mod development as well. Here are the general event rules:

• The Modding Event is open from Sept. 26th to Oct. 18th to players worldwide.
  
• All Event mods need to be uploaded to Steam Workshop.
  
• For English mods, modders need to tag their Event mods with “[Mod Event]” at the beginning of their mod names, e.g. “[Mod Event] Medieval map”.
  
• We will select some best mods among the entries and offer their modders special prizes, including one First Prize worth $1100, two Second Prize worth $740 each, three Third Prize worth $370 each, and 10 Participation Prize worth $70 each.
  

To help English modders understand how to use the Mod Editor, the devs have prepared a full documentation of English mod development in the official wiki and will keep updating the manual with instructional videos in the future. If you encounter any problems when creating English mods, please join us on our Discord and our team will be there ready to answer any questions and help solve your modding issues.

[h2]Pick Localized Mods in Workshop [/h2]
There are already hundreds of mods available in Steam Workshop, featuring custom maps, new characters, themes, perks and more. To provide English players with a more diverse gaming experience, some of our modders have uploaded their localized mods to Workshop. If you wanna subscribe to these mods, go to the Workshop in-game and select “English Localized Mods” in the drop-down menu at the upper-left corner of the screen to browse the list.



Please note that these mods may contain some untranslated parts and bugs, but the modders in our community are willing to listen to your feedback and optimize their work. There will be more translated mods coming in the future. If you want to see your favorite mod or a particular type of mods to be localized, leave your comments below or in our Discord!

Hi everyone! Since Sands of Salzaar’s latest content update that brought the game to English players, we have been receiving countless great feedback and kind words. Everyone on the dev team is thrilled to deliver the game to a new audience, and we thank you for all the support!

We are actively going through all the feedback and bug reports to address the issues as soon as possible with daily updates. Yesterday we released patch 0.8.0.2 to fix some urgent issues like ultrawide users not being able to start a new game and missing final boss model. Today we will be releasing another update, you can read the patch notes below.

As always, if you encounter any issue, please join us on our Discord server and let us know, this is the fastest way to get feedback directly to us, so we highly encourage you to do so!



[h3]2020-09-25 Codename: Battle of the Black Sun (0.8.0.3)[/h3]

Bugfixes

• A small number of players may encounter issues when playing the in-game cinematics, causing crashes at game start or the ending cinematic. We've re-encoded the cinematics and added a detection mechanism. If you encounter this issue, please try again, the game will automatically detect the previous error and offer a skip option to avoid this.
  
• You can now properly select higher difficulty after completing the main story once.
  
• Non-host players can properly spawn enemies after interacting with certain mechanics in multiplayer.
  
• Made an attempt to address AI enemy units moving out of bounds in battle, causing players to not be able to defeat them.
  
• Certain abilities now properly break invisibility after use.
  
• Fixed an issue causing repaired items to still show as broken.
  
• Random quests that require defeating certain heroes can now be properly completed.
  
• Some open world map collision fixes.
  
• Various translation and text fixes.
  
• You can now talk to the female Ifrit to skip being stuck in the wrong map for the quest "Rivers and Goddesses".
  
• Fixed a map collision issue around the Jade Stone chest in one of the Ifrit camps.
  
• Fixed an issue causing players to trigger the battle with Olum twice if clicked too quickly.
  
• Fixed an issue causing certain swappable abilities to not function properly when changing maps in multiplayer.
  
• Fixed some UI issues caused by certain buffs in multiplayer.
  
• You can now properly continue the conversation if you choose to keep Ox's secret in Jihan's quest.
  
• The quest log will now correctly reset after Beastmaster/Shaman completes the story quest of Husnu.

Adjustments

• Added a ritual marking to the entrance of Knight-Errant's main story dungeon.
  
• Deserters now spawn in smaller areas for deserter hunt quests.
  
• Added items scattered on the map for "Rivers and Goddesses" level.
  
• Dyed Shawl and Mastigure Knight Emblem now have a durability of 50.
  
• Geometry and collision fixes for multiplayer map B.
  
• Reduced cast time for Swordcraft: Arc Swing, Aftershock, Archery: Barrage, Archery: Cloudpierce, Archery: Icy Barrage, Archery: Fireblast, Archery: Firehail and Archery: Icehail.
  
• Adjusted attack range for Duress, Swordcraft: Arc Swing, Aftershock and Ancient Machina: Boomerang.
  
• Redesigned Swordcraft: Flash.
  
• Increased attack speed for these weapons in multiplayer: Fireball Wand, Frost Wand, Radiant Wand, Ultimate Staff, Ultimate Wand, Death Wand and Bone Staff.
  
• Reduced cast time for these skills in multiplayer: Bubble Trouble and Earth's Refuge.

Optimizations

• Pressing the map hotkey in battle now closes the map.
  
• Added a more distinctive indicator for the player character in battle maps.

Since the Early Access launch, we have been constantly adding new features, new content and all kinds of fixes to Sands of Salzaar to improve the player experience. Today, the newest chapter in the desert saga begins!


The Battle of the Black Sun Update launches on Steam at 9am PST, September 22nd, bringing the highly anticipated English localization to the game, along with a wide range of new content, optimizations, and a best-ever discount of 40% until Oct. 6!

We have also released the original soundtrack for our game, available below:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1416310/Sands_of_Salzaar_Soundtrack/

You can join the discussion of Sands of Salzaar by following us on Twitter, and hang out with like-minded players in our official Discord server.

[h2]Update Highlights[/h2]

[h3]Now in English![/h3]
Sands of Salzaar is now officially out in English! Over 500 thousand words worth of content have been fully translated into English for players from all over the world to enjoy!

[h3]The Desert Legend continues[/h3]
Main Story
The main story of Sands of Salzaar receives significant additions in this update, with 60 thousand words of new content that further progresses and fleshes out the story. The secrets behind Ilayda and The Ifrit will be there for you to discover...

The five factions now have more significant roles to play. New battle additions also further tie up the gameplay element with the narrative.

The Ifrit’s Domain
Ifrit Void Master returns to his crusade against humanity with his eight henchmen and ten fortresses. The barrier imposed by the River Goddess eons ago has been broken, revealing the Ifrit Domain and connecting it to the desert.

Will you continue to uphold your guard for humanity, or will you create a new world order with The Ifrit?

New Side Quests
Side quests involving Olum and Book of Fire are added. New mysteries are also unearthed alongside The Ifrit’s conspiracies, waiting for the most steely-eyed adventurers to discover and challenge. Beware, your choice might make them unnecessarily complicated…

[h3]Multiplayer[/h3]
In this update, we also introduced multiplayer for the first time to Sands of Salzaar. We provided an official campaign called “Battle of the Black Sun” as a demonstration.


In Battle of the Black Sun, you can play alongside up to 3 other players (4 total), select from 10 characters with 5 different archetypes to begin an adventure. Gain levels and skill points by completing combat challenges, learn increasingly powerful skills, loot and purchase gear with different powers, explore the world and unearth mysteries with your friends.

The Multiplayer Arena feature is highly experimental, the current iteration is meant to be an example for MOD developers, showcasing the possibilities. There will be some issues including crashes and instabilities. We will be constantly monitoring how this feature performs, making changes and adding new content to fully flesh out this experience.

This feature is also fully MOD compatible. MOD creators can design their own characters, skills, items and level designs, upload them to the Steam Workshop to share them with the community.

[h3]English MOD support[/h3]

Our commitment to the modding community also expands to the global audience with the English update. The in-game MOD editor is fully translated, and we have localized our full MOD development documentation which you can check out here.

The ability to create multi-language MODs is also added in this update, this feature is currently still under development, we will continue to improve the tools for modders around the world to fully unleash their creative muscle.

A number of popular MODs have been translated into English, so you will be able to enhance your experience from the get go.

[h3]And Much More...[/h3]

For a detailed rundown of additions and changes in this update, read out full release note below:

[h3]Sands of Salzaar Early Access Patch 0.8.0.1 (Codename: Battle of the Black Sun)[/h3]
New Additions:

• Sands of Salzaar is now in English!
  
• Added an experimental Multiplayer Arena mode, with an official multiplayer map: Battle of the Black Sun, which supports a maximum of 4 players.
  
• In this official co-op map, there are 10 characters with 5 archetypes, 88 learnable skills, and 100+ items in the shop. We will keep optimizing the map and add new content to the mode.
  
• Added new storylines worth about 60k words, which replaces the original storyline (you can still use the old saves to play old storylines).
  
• Several main story boss fights and some small-scale systems.
  
• Several sidequests that may spawn as the main storylines unfold.
  
• Added a new side quest related to Book of Fire, with a new skill page and boss fight.
  
• New map: Ifrit Domain, and new Ifrit faction which will be revealed as you continue your main story progression.
  
• Added several new random quests.
  
• Several new heroes have been added to factions, starting as their Sultans.
  
• Secondary outposts have been redesigned, they can now station troops, can be occupied, and can build a limited amount of buildings.
  
• Strategic AI logic has been rewritten. Now AI factions will spontaneously form army groups for offensives and can intelligently select targets to lay siege upon.
  
• Redesigned underlying logic of diplomatic strategies. Al factions can now form alliances and build relationships.
  
• Added a series of staff weapons that scatter around the desert map.
  
• Added some new character models and illustrations.
  

Gameplay Adjustments:

• A balance pass on soldier recruitment fees.
  
• Some specialties can no longer be given as gifts.
  
• Rebalanced loot from certain monsters and dungeons.
  

Bugfixes

• Fixed an issue where specialties could not respawn in some traveling merchants’ inventories.
  
• Fixed an issue where Bounty Hunters are not able to complete their main storyline dungeon.
  
• Fixed an issue that prevents Sultan from upgrading the Jade Mine.
  
• Fixed an issue where NPC could not obtain mounts.
  

[h2]Final Words[/h2]
This update is a very important one for Sands of Salzaar as it opens up the game to a brand new audience. We hope you enjoy our additions and features, and thank you very much for the continuous support.

We would also like to shoutout our passionate beta testers on our official Discord server who helped us polish and improve the update in the past several weeks: Thank you, from the deepest of our hearts.

That’s all from us today, we’ll see you in the desert!