Soulash 2 News

Improvements to stability during world travel.

[h2]Fixed[/h2]

- Soul-sucking animation on kill now properly happens only with the Necromancy passive.
- Fixed a crash related to dying characters in a company.
- Fixed a crash related to animating dead entities.
- Fixed a crash related to the stamina recovery passive.
- Fixed a crash related to state history events.
- Fixed skill list cutting off the weaponsmithing option.
- The " Send Army" button is now correctly displayed since settlement level 2.
- Added tooltips to the "Send Army" button to indicate why they are disabled.
- Souls are correctly displayed under resources on the crafting screen.
- Meat Hand, Head, and Legs no longer add an ability when picked up to the backpack.
- Meat Golem is categorized as a Unit on the recipe list.

Greetings fellow gods,

It's been a while since we've had an update, but the wait is finally over. The time has come to explore the forbidden whispers promising immortal life, tackle the new challenge growing in the snow biome, and enslave the world for profit.

[h2]Conquest[/h2]

Starting from settlement level 2, we can now launch an assault on any NPC settlement to claim it for our state, giving us access to its production and caravan management. As with other battles, we may join in and support our troops or let them handle it while we commit ourselves to different tasks. The world is also prettier with higher resolution tiles.



[h2]Necromancy[/h2]

Claim the souls of the living, raise an army of the dead, construct meat golems, explode skeletons, achieve immortality, and resurrect your previous character to roll with you until the end of times.



[h2]The Undead[/h2]

New danger grows at the edge of the world. The Necrotyrant raises his army to challenge the gods. Will you find a way to deal with this immortal threat?



[h2]Polish Language Support[/h2]

I've been told I'm not allowed to claim I love my country if I don't support my mother's tongue in my creation, so I had to right that wrong. Soulash 2 now supports the Polish language for the game, and will soon support it in the in-game Modding Tools. The language support was integrated into modding. It allows community-made translations that enable only partial file updates of text, not other configurations, making it much easier to maintain as the game grows. I've added support for the European alphabet to my engine, but I'll have to add support for characters from Asian languages separately later.



[h2]Changelog[/h2]

[h3]Added[/h3]
- New skill: Necromancy.
- New unique civilization of Skeletons led by Necrotyrant in the snow biome that can be playable as part of the playthrough rather than game start selection.
- NPC factions can start war for two new reasons: Conquest (taking control of a settlement with military occupation) and Soul Harvest (gathering the lingering souls of the living).
- NPC state factions may now conquer other settlements and occupy them with military units.
- Added an option to send armies to conquer other settlements starting from level 2 settlements.
- New, higher-resolution world map tileset.
- 1 new special location in the snow biome.
- Support for the Polish language.

[h3]Changed[/h3]
- State factions take wealth taxes from settlements at the rate of 0.1% per day.
- Right-clicking can recall a military recruit unit to its respective family on the Settlement Screen.
- Increased dimensions of the settlement selection on the Settlement Management screen.
- Fire Barrage magic scaling reduced to 150% from 250%.
- Buffed Reptilion Bog Knives and Ursan Berserkers.
- Minimum lifesteal amount is 1 health if damage is above 1.
- NPC tooltips in the Settlement Screen show occupations.

[h3]Fixed[/h3]
- Fixed the tooltip of bottom world tiles going out of screen bounds.
- Fixed On Destruction animation trigger to use string instead of integer ID.
- Friendly Mage can now train Pyromancy to a decent level.
- Fixed occasional duplicate player character tile.
- Creating a second character in a world no longer starts at heir selection when a character has no children.
- Special Locations icons on the world map are taken adequately from the locations tilesheet rather than the overlay.

[h3]Modding[/h3]
- Translations support within mods that allows partial file edits with only fields related to names and descriptions.
- For translations, entity name fields and affixes have feminine and neuter form fields.
- The new configurable structure "control_action" in character.json allows the acquisition of companions in the same way as Tame.
- Two new passive effects, "on_kill_create_item" and "on_kill_persona_create_item," that create an item for the player when any being or persona (from a settlement) is killed.
- New properties in character.json disable settling new settlements by a race, restricting the number of settlements, and disabling caravan trading.
- New properties in character.json defining aggression in settlements per race.
- New property in character.json defining allowed casus belli per race.
- New race property "collapse_on_leader_death" makes the entire settlement fall into ruin on the death of a leader.
- Birth cost for race configuration now supports a specific resource, not just a type.
- The reworked Resurrector component adds a delay in years, after which a character may resurrect in their home settlement. The component no longer applies to items.
- Production Actions can now be used to change the entity of a player character and swap components: Persona, Humanoid, Resurrector, Fighter, Movement, and learn abilities from Ability User.
- Skills component now supports min and max values to support any value for NPC characters that are part of special locations.



Previous worlds should work with the new update and support conquest, but it's recommended to start a new one for Necromancy and Liches, as the changes relate to world generation and introduce a new civilization.

This was the biggest update during the Early Access and was the most difficult to tackle, mostly because I took on too many large topics simultaneously. The Conquest update, while already delivered in parts as we had the battle system before, is still opening for further development, just like Settlement Management was when it came out last year. There are multiple features I still wish to develop related to this new system, with some that we've already discussed before, like having options to support armies with our blacksmithing, allowing crafting to serve as a good way to earn money, but that's not all.

In the upcoming weekly or biweekly updates, you can expect features like rebellions and 5th-tier special locations meant to be tackled with armies. Opening our settlements to conquest will also come soon, alongside a rework of the underlying inheritance system. Conquest also opened up empire management, as we may maintain many settlements now during the endgame, and that will require more clarity in UI and options to maintain supply lines. In the next few months, you can expect that to be the development direction, alongside improvements to building, settlement management, and trading. Once those options are available and I can adjust things based on your feedback, we'll move towards the next major milestone on the roadmap - world events.

Thank you for your patience and support. I hope you have lots of fun. Please let me know about your experience with the new features on our Discord.

Have fun,
Artur

Greetings fellow gods,

It's been over a month since the last update, and many of you appropriately started asking, "Necromancy when?", so I thought it might be a good time to update you on where things are and how much longer it will be until you can all live happily ever after with your (un)dead wives.

[h3]Raise the Dead[/h3]

My work is currently focused on necromancy and the new civilization of the undead led by Necrotyrant, a unique, immortal lich necromancer who threatens the world with his army of the dead.

Both necromancy and the undead civilization will not be available as a starting choice during player creation but will be uniquely accessible through play - by conquering the undead citadel, purifying the Monolith of Awakening, and becoming the new Necrotyrant controlling the undead army.

The necromancy skill will be uniquely focused on harvesting the souls of living beings in settlements and corrupting them to then use for assembling undead workers and warriors. It will be a skill tailored towards acquiring power by causing death to living civilizations.



[h3]Conquest[/h3]

The goal of the Conquest update is to enable taking control of other settlements. As players, we'll be able to create a state faction that will open up our settlements to attacks and allow us to field offensive armies that will take control of NPC towns, giving us access to their production and population management.

Those who prefer a more chill experience by building their towns uninterrupted will still be able to do so without proclaiming an independent state and participating in wars.

NPC factions may also decide to enslave weaker races instead of occasionally raiding them for their wealth and acquiring power that way.

This feature will open up a potential major endgame goal for our characters: controlling and ruling the world.

[h3]World Map Revamp[/h3]

We're working on a world map revamp that will increase the resolution of tiles and change the palette to fit the game's GUI better. We still need to make some tweaks to ensure locations are easily visible, but we're already close, and this should also be done for v0.9.



[h3]Polish Language[/h3]

Since November, we've been working on allowing translations into the engine and game. My wife has been hard at work translating the entire game to Polish since the beginning of the year, and she's been constantly cursing the amount of content we already have in the game, but I'll do my best to negotiate some more for you guys.

We're currently testing, tweaking, and ensuring everything makes sense. Once that's done, it should be a part of v0.9 as well. We'll have solid translation support in mods alongside it and explore options for officially supporting other languages in the full release 1.0 planned for next year.



These are the significant changes currently being made. I know things have been slower than usual recently, and I can't wait to get this big update done and return to the weekly updates schedule, which feels much more efficient in terms of development progress. Because all these major features are so intertwined through shared mechanics, it felt right to take more time and get all of them together at once.

The work on v0.9 will take a few more weeks, so expect the update in April. Once v0.9 releases, we'll be back in the weekly schedule and focus on features related to settlement management and trading as first priority.

I'm looking forward to your feedback on the upcoming changes.

Artur

[h3]Changed[/h3]
- When building, the cheapest available resource of the required type is prioritized.

[h3]Fixed[/h3]
- Fixed history simulation freeze related to wars.
- Greatswords and Engraved Greatswords no longer play arrow shooting animations on attack.
- Fixed battle reports display mixing with previously selected entities in the Beings tab.