The Black Grimoire: Cursebreaker News

Bugfix: Items placed on a desk inside a player house despawn after loading back into the game

First things first, as per the title, we're excited to announce October 27th as the date for full release update for The Black Grimoire: Cursebreaker!

[h3]Upcoming Features in the Full Release Update[/h3]



To sum up our plans on transitioning away from early access, we aim to clean up some of the existing content, provide more full skill progression and expand the late game experience for those who enjoy spending more time with the game.

To that end, the full release will be accompanied by a major content update including (though not limited to...)

• Skill level caps increased to 100
  
• Plenty of new craftables included
  
• Unlockable high level ogre mountain area with new quests, mobs, new dungeons and lots of new gear
  
• Achievements (on Steam and in-game)
  
• Visual improvements
  
• Bugfixes and performance improvements
  
• Balancing enemy stats and drops
  

We already detailed some of these plans in our previous dev blog, in case you're curious to have a look there. However, we'll also share more details and screenshots by the time we're ready to release.



Over the course of our Early Access period we've received tons of feedback and bug reports from all of you, which has helped us greatly in identifying and fixing many bugs and problems within the game. However, while we've been busy with development and prioritizing different things, it's possible we sometimes miss things from your feedback.

So if you as a player feel like there's something fundamental bugging you about the game, even if it may have been raised by someone else already, don't be shy to bring it up and discuss it on our Discord or Steam forums, or send us a report in-game.

[h2]Upcoming changes to inventory management.[/h2]

Having to deal with a restricted inventory was a foundational design decision from the early onset of this game - you were never meant to be able to loot absolutely everything all the time, or were expected to make choices around what you valued to loot most - but it's fair to say that widely players have just found the inventory experience frustrating.

While we soon made adjustments to it after the EA release (Horsy the Packmule, refining ores into stacks, changed stack sizes for some items found in abundance...), we've now worked on some additional tools to give players more options on how to manage the inventory (some of which may come into play before getting access to personal storage or before encountering Horsy).

Straight up more inventory space - 35 inventory slots up from 24, in a 7 x 5 rows presentation as opposed to current 6 x 4.

Scroll of True Alchemy - a new magical, consumable item that immediately converts an item into its worth in gold.

Salvaging - workbenches and salvage kits that turn items into stackable scrap, which may be exchanged for crafting materials.

Universal Bags - a few special bag items that may hold a number of any items within.

Horsy Upgrades - you'll be able to acquire items that speed up Horsy's return from the bank, or call him back without visiting a stables after having sent him away.

Salvaging workbenches can be found in various locations

[h2]Quick Q&A[/h2]

Q: Will the price of the game increase upon full release?

A: No, for now we've decided to keep the price unchanged.

Q: Will the Main Story Quests be expanded in the upcoming release?

A: No, although what is already in place may receive some polish. We're not yet ruling out delivering a major update post release to expand on the quest chain involving Gabrius and Eloria, but more than likely we'll prefer to continue that adventure in another title entirely.

Q: Will the release update bring the option to play as female?

A: No, for now we're prioritizing other aspects of the game. However, we may add this feature later down the line, we're not ideologically opposed to it due to story/lore reasons. But it does require more work than simply adding a button in the character creation; the dialogues will need to be edited to distinguish between Lord/Lady and the vast majority of armor models do not as of now support other than the male body model.

Q: Are necromancer/raise dead abilities coming to the game?

A: This was a feature we were entertaining around the time of the EA launch and has periodically been asked about since. Unfortunately, after experimenting with it this past spring, we decided to put it in the freezer for now. We may return to it post launch but it will not be a part of the upcoming release update.

Q: Can we skip the prologue?

A: One of the most frequent complaints we see relates to the prologue. Aside from some awkward pacing related to the amount and length of the cutscenes, we've identified that the most glaring issue with the prologue is that in its current form it acts as something of a story obstacle, where the "real game" doesn't quite begin until you've cleared it.

In initial versions of the game it was actually quite packed with cute little sidequests, such as searching the castle grounds for your children, training sword fighting with your son, hunting deer with the groundskeeper etc. Alas, these were deemed deadly boring by our earliest testers and we had some difficulty cobbling the whole thing together... I'd like to think we've come a long way since developing that bit of content.

In any case, though we're reluctant to deal away with the prologue entirely, we've been looking at ways to rework it so that it would feel like the game begins from the actual beginning, instead of needing to sit through a somewhat separate story sequence first. To that end, you should be able to encage with most of the skills and find some form of side content through exploration of the manor grounds. But we'll keep you updated on where we land with this.

Q: Will there be multiplayer?

A: The short answer is no. The social online function may sometimes give the impression that the game might not be that far off from true multiplayer functionality, but that's just not the case. The game relays chat messages between players, but to have it relay literally everything else is a challenge a team our size is not fit to deal with. Light co-op multiplayer features may be in the realm of possibility in the future, such as a minigame that could be played together with another player, but it's definitely not anything we're committed to at this time.

[h3]That's our news for now.[/h3]

As always, if you have any burning questions, we'll do our best to answer them on our discord server. which is where you're most likely to get a hold of us - the link's included down below. With that said, it's time to wish you all happy gaming and enjoyable rest of your summer!

Regards,
Pura

Greetings adventurers!

Welcome to a devblog / news post, where we detail what we’ve been working on and what’s coming next for the game. As we’ve previously stated, we’re now focused on delivering the Cursebreaker Release Update, to bring the game out of early access. Since our last content update we’ve also delivered a number of invisible bugfix patches to the game, we’ve recorded a list for some of those at the end of this post.

So what new will we bring to the game at release? First of all, we’re raising the maximum achievable skill level to 100 for the most dedicated players to work towards. This increase in the level ceiling will be accompanied with appropriate unlockable milestones, so plenty of new harvestables and craftable items.

To help accommodate the increased skill cap, we’re expanding the outdoors map with a new ogre mountain area named Amarien's Foothills.





The mountain parts are more of a late game area that’s to be unlocked through completing certain quests on the “mainland”. To this end, we're finishing off the loose end that is the bandit fortress in Haywind. Completing these "prequel" bandit quests will through twists and turns lead you to the ogre mountains.



As you travel to the new map, you will initially encounter a wide outdoors area and battle high level ogres who’ve begun attacking human settlements. Beware, nasty barbarian foes may also be camping at remote mountain corners.



Venturing deeper into the mountains, you will discover dark caverns where the ogres have fortified themselves. Deeper in the climate starts getting quite cold, and eventually these caverns lead down to the nest of a mighty beast even the ogres have learnt to fear…





Higher skill levels naturally require powerful unlocks, and we've already started with new tiers of craftable armors. After all, it will be important to display to all the peasants your new heights of power. Here's a peek at some of the new gear that will be obtainable.





We've already mentioned achievements a few times before, but as a reminder, the release update will add achievements to the game and with them, a lot of small form side content all across the world. We have upwards of 200 achievements lined up that mainly consist of exploration, small helper tasks and grinding out enemies and resources.

Being a helpful busybody and completing tasks and achievements will also earn you ingame rewards.

You will be able to retroactively earn achievements with save games you've started during early access and those saves will continue to be playable.



We're now targeting to deliver the release update around August/September, but we're reluctant to give a strict date as of yet, as there's a lot to go through and we essentially only have 2 pairs of hands working on the game full time. With that said, we're making progress as swiftly as we only can, and we'll make sure to announce the exact release date as soon as we've confidently decided on one.





As mentioned in the intro, we've implemented a number of silent bugfixes to the live game over the past month or so. For the record, here's a list of notable fixes we've applied:

• Removed a duplicate spawner of the grimoire quest item in Etherlight dungeon, which had the potential to break the main quest chain.
  
• Added item descriptions to cannon part items in thornhill academy quest, which were previously missing them.
  
• Fixed broken player house in Timberwell.
  
• Nails may now be bought at general stores.
  
• Torches may now be bought at general stores.
  
• The journal entry in the quest "Bearer of Bad News" now gives instructions on where to find Haywind Town Hall.
  
• The hatchet requirements in the quest "Logging Issues" now make sense and the quest giver gives accurate information on which hatchet is needed and where to get it.
  
• Fixed an alchemy table in east Thornhill, which had stopped being interactable.
  
• Journal entries in the quest "Garden of the Witches" now give accurate information on the amount of herbs that are needed.
  
• Fixed Agathe's dialogue during quest "Garden of the Witches", which contained placeholder texts when asked about the herbs that grow in the swamp.
  
• Fixed the bookshelf of magical knowledge in Greywall Dungeons, which gave out a quest item spellbook at inappropriate times.
  
• Fixed a floating fishing rod in the Spruce Shade crypts.
  
• Added directions to journal entries in the Hunting for Perfection quest, and made the packet of critterskins recoverable if by some means lost.
  
• Fixed interactable overgrowth blocking the way to the Hidden Grove not functioning properly.
  
• Halloween arena final fight should now reset upon losing.
  
• Staff of Spiteful Seas should now function correctly.
  
• + a number of typos and small visual and pathing glitches...
  

As always, if you have any burning questions, we'll do our best to answer them on our discord server. which is where you're most likely to get a hold of us - the link's included down below. With that said, it's time to wish you all happy gaming and enjoyable summer months!

Regards,
Pura

Greetings adventurers!

We have another content update for the game. This time we're finally bringing trainers into Thornhill city as well, and they'll have plenty of new abilities and skill improvements to sell. This update also adds two new quests into Thornhill city, alongside other smaller features, improvements and bugfixes. More details below!

This will be the last Early Access content update for some time, as we're working on sweeping changes to transition the game out of its Early Access state. We'll still be delivering bugfixes and otherwise update on our progress through blog posts.





Within the Academy of Masters you'll find trainers for all the skill disciplines, who may expand your powers and abilities now all the way to level 50. The trainers will also ultimately provide crafting stations as furniture to be obtainable for player homes, as well as special tool racks.



The advanced combat skill trainers provide a number of abilities to be unlocked, such as leaping at your opponents or firing exploding arrows at them, to make combat a little bit more active and to give further tools against challenging boss opponents.



There are more utilitarian abilities to unlock as well, for instance you're now able to turn logs into river canoes near bodies of water to make traveling around the map more convenient.









The Thornhill Academy has a lot stricter standards of admission than Haywind College! Not just anyone can be let in, you know. You'll have to impress the instructors and the headmaster in a new quest "Tribulations of Higher Education", which you can start by talking to the academy's Headmaster Trevelyan.

Within the quest you'll gain access to a sheltered area accessed within Thornhill city, which will contain all the crafting stations within a single location. It serves much the same purpose as the crafting guild in Haywind, adding an easy go-to alternative for when you need to access one of those workbenches.











The Curator of Thornhill's Preservation society has a new task to further open up Thornhill's catacomb area. It should no longer cause confusion regarding to what extent that dungeon is accessible.

In theme with the Curator's previous quest, completing his task will unlock additional new furniture to decorate your homes with.





[h2]Life at the Smuggler Village[/h2]



Our previous update on the swamp smuggler's village left the location looking very unpolished. To be fair, it's not the only one of its kind in the game as of currently, but we took the opportunity to give the building interiors appropriate decoration and lighting.

Additionally the location is now packed with miscellaneous, highly interactive npcs, which should breathe some new life to the place when traveling through.

[h2]Updated Pathfinder![/h2]

We're now updating the game with a new, completely overhauled pathfinder. From the beginning the absolute most commonly occurring bug report we keep receiving is the player character becoming stuck somewhere. The new pathfinder ought to resolve the majority of these issues, though ironically it may also have introduced some new ones.

If you encounter getting stuck somewhere, somehow, please do keep reporting on these. We'll do our best now to regularly iron out any remaining wrinkles regarding this issue.

[h2]New Settings for Optimizing Performance[/h2]

We're aware of the stuttering issues in the game and continue looking into solutions to address the fundamental causes. We've mentioned potentially reworking a lot of the houses before, which in their current state are causing problems especially in/near the large cities.

For now, we've brought a few additional settings into the game that should hopefully help alleviate the issue if you're running into unbearable stuttering:

• Disable Background Characters - hides "useless" characters that cannot fight or be interacted with, should improve performance in crowded areas like cities, at the cost of making them look more empty. (At the moment selecting this also removes most background conversations between random npcs...)
  
• Reduce Movement Quality - improves performance and stutters, at the cost of less smooth character movement
  
• Lower Characters Load Speed - improves performance by limiting the rate at which characters are loaded, but might result in more characters visually 'popping' into view
  

[h2]Notable Bugfixes[/h2]

• The large pillars in the main quest's final boss fight now successfully block the spinning spell that slowly follows the player
  
• Screen sometimes turning black and game freezing during boat travel
  
• Interacting with Horsy the pack mule sometimes resulting in multiple Horsys
  
• Arakite hammer can now be used for refining ore
  
• Fixed three trainer spells - Deadly Strikes, Flight of Arrows and Meditation - to have cooldowns and mana costs, which they previously did not have.
  
• Adjusted all hostile npc stats and loot within thornhill catacombs
  
• Fixed broken combat stats on some trolls and adjusted all trolls stats, for instance to include hp regeneration.
  
• Added trader icon and right-click trade option to Agathe in swamp village after her quest is complete, which was previously missing.
  

At this stage we're pausing larger updates, as we're focused now on delivering some sweeping changes, sorting out all clearly unfinished things and trying to polish out as much jank as possible, so as to haul the game out of Early Access. Before then, we'll still deliver small updates in the form of bug fixing where needed. We'll also do our best to write dev blogs to showcase our progress and what will be coming in the "release" update of the game.

Thank you all for the continued support, feedback and for playing the game as much as some of you already have - thank you, and happy gaming!

Regards,
Pura

Greetings adventurers!



Today we're excited to bring into the game its single biggest content installation so far - the Dungeons of Greywall! All in all, the windy corridors of this new dungeon span an area larger than Haywind City and come packed with new enemies to fight, new crafting to unlock and ultimately new abilities to learn. There's also a hefty amount of new written content that comes in the form of the single largest quest anywhere in the game, which will guide your journey through the dungeons.



The dungeon's level design features a new set of assets we created to achieve a more unique look that also sets the area apart from other regions in the game. Combined with an ambitiously scoped quest, getting this update together really did take a lot of effort on our part and we're a little delayed from when we hoped to deliver it. But hopefully our efforts also show in the gaming experience the new content delivers.



This time we won't type out detailed patch notes due to the amount and focus on new material, but we will showcase the new content in a devblog format.







The quest to investigate the Ghost of Greywall is a continuation to the quest called Echoes of Suffering we introduced in a previous update and cannot be started without completing that quest first (you can pick it up in the Ratcliffe mining village). Once Echoes of Suffering is completed, you'll be prompted to visit the priest residing at Haywind's River Shrine to discuss your experiences.



A conversation with the priest will send you on your way to investigate an undead corruption gripping the halls of Greywall - a haunted underground prison.

Once you've wrestled your way into the dungeon, you'll find it defended by a wide variety of undead monsters. In order to uncover the truth about Greywall's curse and to vanquish The Ghost of Greywall, you'll have to fight your way into the deepest, darkest depths of the dungeon...

[h2]Fight your way through hordes of undead guarding the prison...[/h2]



We've added a wide variety of new enemies to guard the dungeons, dealing every variety of damage against you both up close and from range. Remember to inspect your enemies, if some of them prove particularly punishing to fight. Chances are they're highly resistant to your choice of attacks, or you're not well defended against theirs. Whatever damage you do take, there are always healing spells, food and potions to pick you up.



This update we've also upgraded the inspect option with a way for us to include descriptions of the special abilities an enemy might have, as well as potential tips for how to defeat them.



[h2]Craft powerful new items...[/h2]

New enemies also come with new things to loot, a lot of which can be crafted into more powerful items than the game previously had available. We've added new craftables almost across the board to accommodate some of the higher ranges of crafting skill levels, but the materials you'll have to loot within the walls of Greywall itself. Not quite all the items we were planning made it in (for example a new bow), but we'll add those afterward.

Speaking of crafting, Greywall's main quest is accompanied by two simpler sidequests, which you'll encounter naturally as you progress along. These are crafting related quests, where one will encourage you to reforge the mighty platearmor of a fallen champion of undead slaying. Reforging such a powerful armor sure ought to feel like an accomplishment, but succeeding in crafting exceptional variants of that armor is on a whole other level...



Oh, and don't forget to unlock your new player house as you roam in search of crafting materials down in the dungeons!



[h2]Silvermirror Ampoules[/h2]



The other crafting sidequest you'll run into, 'Garden of the Witches', happens in the Silvermirror swamps. An alchemist lady in the smuggler village will teach you how to craft ampoules, small potions that grant you entirely overpowered levels of protection against incoming attacks. But their effects only last for a few seconds, so time them well.


Ampoule crafting has brought with it a whole new set of swamp plants required as ingredients, and small modifications to the terrain have been made here and there, which should vastly improve the experience of pathing and exploring in the swamp area. You'll also notice the swamp village houses have been reworked using more appropriate and far less resource intensive assets.

[h2]Action bar and other changes[/h2]

A lot of unlockable abilities, spells and new consumables have crept into the game since the early days, which has been desperately calling for us to increase the capacity of the action bar, and in this update we have done so. You'll now find +/- buttons next to the action bar to add or remove space to your liking.



Additionally we've fixed some bugs and broken things in a few previous quests causing issues, as per player feedback (which continues to be invaluable to us by the way, thanks once again), and a most elusive and mysterious bug causing special items (primarily the Soulfire Crystal and Mistywood Talisman) to disappear from inventory at seemingly random - it should now also be very much resolved.

[h2]What's coming next?[/h2]

Though creating Greywall has been a really good exercise for us in terms of learning to create more immersive questing experiences, we likely won't be developing a similarly scoped body of questing content any time soon - certainly not before we officially bring the game out of early access.

This doesn't mean we won't develop more quests - we definitely will - but we're shifting our focus more on skill progression next, as well as the Thornhill Trainers players have been asking about since we released in early access.

We're also just about ready to address long standing technical issues in the game. When we first released early access, we announced we'd start working on a reworked pathing system to get rid of those pesky 'getting stuck' problems we keep getting reports about. That pathing rework is nearing completion and we'll hopefully soon be ready to implement it into the game.

On the other hand we're aware there's a lot of annoying cpu stuttering sometimes while playing the game and those become especially prevalent near the big cities, particularly Haywind. A large cause of that is the game actually loading the houses themselves, so we're planning to just rework almost all of the housing using our tailor made house assets, in the same manner as we now replaced the housing at swamp village.

The work on an achievement system also continues. However, as we previously announced, we decided to postpone implementing that into the live game until the official release update - it makes a lot more sense that way as we're constantly in the process of adding achievement-worthy content into the game still.

In terms of expanding the map, for the release update our plans include an ogre infested mountain zone... but we'll talk more about that as its time comes near.

In the meantime, we sincerely hope to see you enjoying the Dungeons of Greywall and let us know what you think of it, perhaps what you think it's missing and what improvements could be made. Feedback is best shared to us on our Discord, where we do read all your feedback even when we might not always be super quick to respond to it.

With that said, it's time to wish you all happy gaming!

Regards,
Pura