Soulash 2 News

Greetings fellow gods,

In today's weekly update, v0.7.6, we have a new crafting skill for you called Imbuing. It allows crafting amulets, rings, headgear, and new magic ingredients by combining them. It's kinda like Jewelrycrafting meets Alchemy, but not the smelly kind.

From other interesting news, things have been progressing well, and our team is growing! I've managed to clone myself, and my dear friend who goes by the same first name (the one who created for us the incredible music tracks available in the game and standalone OST) will help us with creating content outside the game, like short story videos, guides, tutorials and anything else that would enhance the worlds of Soulash and hopefully inspire new players to find their own stories within them.

We're currently experimenting with a short story video format on YouTube, TikTok, and Twitter, so follow us there and let us know what you think! Would you be interested in long-form stories as well?

Here's our recent day in the life of a dwarf short. And we're premiering the first Soulash 2 love story today, so don't miss it!

I'm too pumped about this, so let's move on to the obligatory changelog before I spoil everything:

[h3]Added[/h3]
- New Skill: Imbuing - focused on jewelry crafting and magic ingredient creation.
- 23 new items.
- 18 new magic ingredients.
- Added descriptions to amplifiers.

[h3]Changed[/h3]
- Armorsmithing, Carpentry, Imbuing, Leatherworking, Tailoring, and Weaponsmithing start on level 1 on new characters.
- Party members don't produce sound notification animation when walking outside the view range.
- Improved stability of settlement food simulation.
- Improved NPC crafter behavior by staying closer to workstations during work hours.
- New property for Vampire Fangs.
- Arctic Flower can be found in the wild.
- Bamboo Tree now stands out more.

[h3]Fixed[/h3]
- Fixed crash on death when some stat points were not used.
- Added missing dialogues to some animals.
- Fixed occasional invalid caravan animation path.
- Fixed duplicated border of character on mouseover when a character is on the move.
- Fixed a rare simulation crash where Mushman Toolmaker forgot he was dead while attempting to become the next Circle King.

[h3]Modding[/h3]
- Added "description" property to amplifiers to provide flavor or functionality information.
- New optional "level_start" property in skills.json can define the starting level for a skill.
- Fixed crash on armors list in Datatable.


What's next? I'm designing 2 new combat magic skills, but we won't rush into them as I want new mechanics. At this time, I would like to focus more on the next major update, v0.8, and tweaking the companion system a bit, improving the AI in general. Next Thursday's update will be smaller and probably mostly technical, maybe with some UI & UX tweaks. But first, I need to take a few days off to recharge before jumping deep into the bigger Settlement Management features.

Thank you all for being so supportive, for sharing your joy in the game, and for your feedback. We're in a very good place right now as we're moving towards the second checkpoint on our Roadmap, and things continue to get even more exciting. I can't wait to show you the future that I already see!

Enjoy the new content,
Artur

Two things hotfixed:

- Fixed crashes related to sailing.
- Fixed crashes related to missing dialogue options.

Greetings fellow gods,

My whole week was spent on a technical task, so the changelog will be short. I've decided to add multithreading to history simulation to animate what's happening during world generation, and eventually when more things will become interactable, also during playthrough.

I won't bore you with tech details, but here's a short video showcasing the caravan trading simulation added in this version.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Be aware that debug mode can slow down simulation significantly because of how much information is generated to monitor the settlements.

Eventually, when we reach v0.10, I plan to integrate the caravans into a random encounter system so we may be able to rob help them. Before that, I also planned to integrate the war/battles into the simulation display, so this was a crucial hurdle to go through that opened up many cool possibilities.

This was rather unplanned, but I'm glad I finished it. Next, I want to focus on a new magic skill and build smaller features around the upcoming v0.8 Settlement Management update planned for June.

Here's the full changelog:

[h3]Added[/h3]
- Display of caravan trading during history simulation when creating a world.
- New animals.
- 4 new special locations.
- 16 new resources.

[h3]Changed[/h3]
- Tweaked spawn rate of some natural resources.
- Party members enter fully rested into the region like the player character.

[h3]Fixed[/h3]
- Fixed Sunken Temple locations sometimes not spawning.
- Fixed an issue with Bone Dust production by Bone Sages.
- Fixed Consuming Slash ability.
- Added missing special locations conversation option to Ursan Hunters.

Have fun,
Artur

Greetings fellow gods,

I've got two major additions for you this week!

First, a new civilization of humanoid bears from cold tundra regions - Ursans! These reindeer farmers are known for their berserker might.



And we've got the second most popular player request - sea travel. Special pirate locations can be discovered worldwide that allow passage over the ocean to any shore. Remember to stock up on food and water if you plan a longer voyage and bring some coins to pay the seafaring rascals.



These features will work only on new worlds as they are tied to the world generation.

Here's the full changelog:

[h3]Added[/h3]
- New civilization - Ursans (only new worlds).
- Added Sea Shores to region generation.
- New hidden special locations allowing sea travel (only new worlds).
- New fish types to catch in the sea.
- New resources in the Tundra region.

[h3]Changed[/h3]
- Bone Wraith Spearmaker has access to more spear recipes.

[h3]Fixed[/h3]
- Fixed crash related to AI chasing killed beings.
- Fixed crash related to AI attempting to attack killed beings.
- Fixed crash on taming a rabbit.
- When trading and it happens that there are no equipment slots to hold the purchased items, they are dropped under the player character.
- Fixed Fire Beetle's willpower.
- Fixed damage bonus from effects applying to abilities.
- Removed duplicated recipes in construction.
- Fixed lag related to AI not being able to fish.

[h3]Modding[/h3]
- Fixed crash in enemies datatable.
- Added an option for building maps to generate it close to the edge of the map.

[h3]v0.7.4.1 Hotfix[/h3]
- Crash on generating a region on the top edge of the map.
- Ursans take orders for items.

[h3]v0.7.4.2 Hotfix[/h3]
- Fixed rare crash during history simulation.

[h3]v0.7.4.3 Hotfix[/h3]
- Fixed crash on old worlds related to missing map file.

At this stage, I will begin working on the next major update related to managing our settlements, which is scheduled for June. Expect some improvements to the building system.

Check out TurnBasedThursdayFest, which starts today, to grab awesome turn-based games! Both Soulash and Soulash 2 participate with discounts as well.

Thank you all for the awesome support. We've recently reached 10,000 copies sold in the 4 months of Early Access, and it's been an absolutely incredible experience for me to be able to spend my full time working on the game of my dreams. It's all thanks to you, and I hope you're as excited as I am for what's yet to come!

Enjoy your bear hugs,
Artur

Greetings fellow gods,

This week, I worked hard to solve some technical issues I've been putting off forever: x64 architecture migration and UTF-8 character rendering.

The x64 migration solves our lack of memory to build bigger worlds and regions. It improves the game's stability and will unlock more z-levels to play around with, going up and down.

The UTF-8 support is limited to European and Russian alphabets for now, as these were the most commonly requested. This is a major step forward in creating a modding system for translations. However, it will take more time to do it properly - we still need at least a partial entity update to override only the text fields while keeping the mechanical properties unaffected.

There have been some additional major improvements to the generation, mainly dwarven and elven settlements, to make it easier to traverse and find specific buildings we need. The dwarven rooms will now be closer together and expand below the ground instead of to the nearby mountains.



And something that has been requested for some time now, we can filter known beings by skill name to find the desired trainers!



Here's the full changelog:

[h3]Added[/h3]
- Added support for searching by skill name in the Knowledge Beings tab, which will find all known beings with the searched skill above 10.
- Added support for European and Russian special characters rendering.
- Added auto rest action when performing a basic attack without stamina.
- A few new natural resources were added to the grasslands, forests, and mountains.

[h3]Changed[/h3]
- Updated the engine and game architecture to x64, fixing the out of memory issues related to big maps.
- Improved text sharpness.
- Improved road generation to make the world less cluttered.
- Changed dwarven settlement generation to generate rooms closer together and go deeper underground rather than spread over multiple hills on z-level 0.
- Dwarven and Elven settlements now generate multiple flights of stairs connecting z-levels.
- Z-level position of buildings is shown when asking for directions in settlements.
- Mushrooms changed to be gatherable to unlock as resouces found in the region.
- Gathering is now a forbidden action at human, dwarven and mushmen settlements.
- Removed the debug console window when starting the game.
- Added info to Bedroll and Pillow that they are used from backpack.

[h3]Fixed[/h3]
- Fixed rare crash on region map generation.
- Fixed crash related to Hunter's Stew and other foods, giving special bonuses.
- Fixed rare crash related to exiting regions.
- Fixed rare crash related to escaping AI characters.
- Fixed rare crash on character creation.
- Fixed human settlements falling into ruin during the early generation phase.
- Fixed bonus max potential from age being provided too soon for older races.
- Fixed skills from mods not unloading once the mods were disabled.
- Walls of rooms are no longer carved out in Dwarven settlements.
- Fixed missing corridors connecting some buildings in Dwarven settlements.
- Fixed elven Grey Watchers and War Dancers building name generation.
- Removed the "Tree Background" option from ask for direction conversation options in eleven settlements.
- Items with negative food value are no longer consumed automatically.
- Swapped the tooltip descriptions of Analyze Speed and Analyze Weakness.

[h3]Modding[/h3]
- Added producers list in datatable of resources.
- Crafting recipes can once again be assigned to races.


I hoped to introduce the new civilization today, but unfortunately, we had to postpone it due to technical difficulties (laptop broke down). We've also begun working on port special locations to allow for a way to pass the oceans, so hopefully, we'll be able to bring in both next week.

Thank you to everyone who helped test the beta branch of x64! Please swap back to the main one now, as I'll remove the beta branch in the next few days.

Have fun,
Artur