Soulash 2 News

Greetings fellow gods,

Today, I have a new skill for you - Agriculture. It's been a while since we had one, the last time being Thievery before the EA release, so it felt like a good time to finally expand our possibilities again.

The new skill focuses on food production, allowing one to gather and plant seeds, cook delicious meals, and find new profitable opportunities in the world.

Agriculture uniquely offers only 30 levels instead of the typical 50, and that's on purpose. I've heard your feedback about some skills, and even though they provide exciting things, they are not worth 40 potential points when competing with combat skills, so I wanted to use this opportunity to experiment here and see what you think, potentially condensing some other skills in the future.

Also, for those who asked for a way to leave a legacy in the world - you can now plant a tree that will grow for 30 years. House building was already available. So we're missing a way to create descendants, and the game is complete, right? ;)

Here's today's changelog:

[h3]Added[/h3]
- New Skill: Agriculture.
- Seeds for trees, bushes, and vegetables.
- New cooking recipes with special effects when consumed.
- Added a Hoe to Weaponsmithing and a Wooden Hoe to Carpentry.
- During Famine, food prices in settlements are higher by 50%.
- Additional backgrounds for racial portraits.

[h3]Changed[/h3]
- Bread, Wheat Flour, and Straw Hat recipes moved from Adventuring to Agriculture.
- Beehive recipe moved from Construction to Agriculture.
- Reduced Cooked Meat nutrition to 40.
- Multitool is now also a Hoe and a Shovel.
- New graphic for Multitool.
- Auto consumption doesn't apply to food granting Special Effects.

[h3]Fixed[/h3]
- Building recipes now properly requires having tools.
- Fixed roof being incorrectly calculated on z-level above 0.

[h3]Modding[/h3]
- Template for mods distributed with the game no longer has workshop id.
- Craftable building recipes can now have a restriction for placement on specific backgrounds.
- Craftable recipes for buildings can now be restricted to specific biomes.
- Added production actions as potential exp source providers for skills.
- Added 4 new passive effects related to production actions, crafting and growing crops.
- Replaced "poisonous" and "raw" Food component properties with "on_eat" property that activates chosen ability on consumption.

Enjoy!

Greetings fellow gods,

This time I'm tackling some of the pending major bugs reported on Discord. Unless some significant issues need addressing, we'll return to weekly Thursday updates from here.

[h3]Changed[/h3]
- When asking for trainers nearby, the tracking ping is set on specific NPC instead of their assigned building.
- True damage turns into Physical when hitting a non-being entity.
- Bone Axe moved to milestone level 16 of Weaponsmithing and increased the magic ingredient slots to 2.

[h3]Fixed[/h3]
- Added missing workbenches to Human Toolmakers.
- Reduced memory usage in larger regions, improving stability.
- Fixed an issue where purchased resources would remove available resources of the same type in the stash.
- Fixed too many starting bread spawning.
- Fixed Hell amplifier range display in the tooltip.
- Fixed an issue that would rarely make special locations not spawn.
- Fixed a very rare crash caused by infinitely recreating family during history simulation.

[h3]Modding[/h3]
- Added passive property "disable_consumer" that can disable both hunger and thirst.
- Fixed scroll in the Data Tables Abilities section.
- Fixed crash related to Map Editor.

Another day another hotfix. 2 isn't that bad (yet) for a big update, right? ;)

[h3]Fixed[/h3]
- Fixed crash related to Wildfire passive.

[h3]Modding[/h3]
- Fixed crash related to Ability Editor.
- Fixed conversations in mod overriding the core2 ones.
- Fixed mod load order with Steam Workshop mods.
- Fixed mod icons for Steam Workshop mods.
- Fixed mod item tileset overriding images in building tooltips - produces and consumes sections.

Hotfixing some of the issues from yesterday's update.

[h3]Fixed[/h3]
- Fixed NPC crafters not being able to find their workstations.
- Fixed tooltips of Hell, World in Flames and Explosion.
- Fixed some abilities using the Summon effect.
- Removed the `r` key for regenerating new map in the World Generation Screen.

[h3]Modding[/h3]
- Fixed crash related to editing entities with Random Resource component.
- Fixed crash on editing skill books.
- Fixed crashes related to multi z-level map creation.
- Fixed crash related to enemies data table.
- Fixed an issue with publishing related to the invalid mod path used, causing a generic error with API code 2.
- Fixed Summon effect not assigning and loading correctly in Ability Maker.
- Fixed crash on loading Summon White Dear animation.

Greetings fellow gods,

Late Happy New Year everyone, let's start 2024 with a bang!



Today, I have for you the extended Modding Tools that some of you may be familiar with from the first game and Steam Workshop support to share your creations with the community.

I want to take this opportunity to encourage all players who like to express themselves creatively to give it a try! The tools, alongside simple JSON configuration files, offer a lot of flexibility to create your own enemies, items, special locations, abilities, skills, recipes, and even races with whole new civilizations! No coding knowledge is required. You no longer have to wait until I have time to add the playable goat people!

Let's quickly go through the main tools available to give you an idea of what can be done.

[h2]1. Entity Editor[/h2]



The Entity Editor offers the ability to quickly create your own items, resources, enemies, or environmental tiles. It can be as simple as pressing a duplicate button on an existing entity and tweaking a few inputs or as complex as uniquely combining different components to create something unusual that could crash the game. Fun!

[h2]2. Map Editor[/h2]



Soulash 2 offers a mixed approach of procedural and handcrafted maps in settlements and points of interest, and with the Map Editor, you can create alternative building maps for settlements or rooms for special locations.

[h2]3. Ability & Animation Editors[/h2]



With these tools, you can create new combat abilities with custom animations for your future skills or custom enemies.

[h2]4. Datatables[/h2]



This one might be interesting for those of you who like to know everything. Datatables offer information on all kinds of content available within the mod. Very useful for balancing.

And a list of JSON files for defining skills, milestones, amplifiers, passives, buildings, races, conversations, dialogues, special locations, natural resources spawned in biomes, weather conditions, portraits, and some worldgen properties.

Jumping between tools and JSONs may be a little clunky at times. Admittedly, I'm used to it since I've been using them for a long time, so I look forward to improving things with your feedback. We have local documentation available at Soulash 2/data/docs/index.html that I would encourage everyone interested in modding to check out.

There's a lot to tinker with, and the range of options will cause a lot of questions and issues, so if you're hitting a wall, join us on our Discord modding channel to discuss how to make things.

[h2]Other Changes[/h2]

A few bugfixes I managed to squeeze into 0.6.0:
- Reduced overall memory usage of map definitions.
- Fixed attack speed issue where it would default to 1.0 due to hidden hands.
- Fixed Spikehump Spike not allowing assignment when crafting or upgrading.
- Fixed too low prices happening occasionally.
- Fixed issues with cave generation, causing some locations not to spawn correctly.

[h2]What's Next?[/h2]

In the next two or three weeks, we'll focus on new content and reported bug fixes, and then I'll take a week-long break to recharge as I didn't manage to catch a breath yet after the EA release, and burnout is starting to creep in. After the break, I'll plan out updates in 2024 with your popular suggestions from Discord and announce the promised roadmap.

Thank you all for your support, and I hope you'll have a lot of fun modding the game,
Artur