Sternly Worded Adventures News

This is mostly fixes, but it does include over 400 new words, which are mostly most of the new new additions to Collins Scrabble Words for 2025, including 'bantz', excluding about 190 new CSW words that failed my personal criteria for inclusion, with the rest being from missing word reports. Other 'content' additions include about half of the character roster being able to blink, and have the sturdy belt represented on them, and the adventurer being able to be bald and also having the runed gear be represented on them.

[h3]UI:[/h3]

• Exposed windowed resolution to config.
  
• Windowed resolution now set on launch to 90% of desktop resolution if it's the same size or larger.
  
• Added a one time message about the fact that the game auto-saves.
  
• Added a one time message that the demo ends when you get to a level 4 area on the demo.
  
• Pressing on either item bar on the pregame screen takes you directly to the screen to re-arrange/re-equip them.
  
• The craft button now has a glow behind it when it can be used.
  

[h3]Overworld:[/h3]

• Fixed the music not restarting after combat until it would change.
  
• Fixed the player wagon not turning into a raft if they manage to get on water.
  
• Darkened the player wagon, and set the 'canopy' of the wagon to the player shirt/robe colour.
  
• Fixed being able to trigger the anomaly event from inside a sub-world, causing a crash.
  

[h3]Items:[/h3]

• Fixed not being able to take the arbitrarily hard brick multiple times. For reals this time.
  
• Reworded refreshing water to remove the word 'cumulatively', and outright say that you can use it multiple times a turn on the 'water bottle' version of the item.
  

[h3]Enemies:[/h3]

• Boss fire elementals no longer indefinitely sustain your life at the brink of death with legal but 0-scoring tiles.
  
• Fixed hanging spiders giving untelegraphed attack tiles when knocked down from hanging.
  

[h3]Character sprites:[/h3]

• Characters now blink on the start menu and class selection screen, if able.
  
• Added blink and belt layers to halfling, woodsman, warrior, assassin, and paladin.
  
• Fixed 'load' on the sprite test screen not correctly loading your hair if you're not in combat.
  
• Adventurer:
  
• Added layers for the runed bracelet and runed circlet.
  
• Added bald layer.
  
• Eyepatch now draws the full strap over the base hair and bald.
  
• Belt is now a layer enabled by the sturdy belt.
  

[h3]Words:[/h3]

• Added around 400 of the around 600 words that will be newly Scrabble legal in 2025.
  
• UwU and OwO still requires the book of UwU item to use.
  
• Added: fupa, fupas, slack-jawed, metagame and derived terms, awa, zouave and zouaves, squabbier and squabbiest.
  
• Added fapper and fappers to the curses dictionary.
  
• Removed umpteenth and related from the curses dictionary.
  

[h3]Definitions:[/h3]

• Changed the definition of bruh from 'rhesus macaque' to the more commonly accepted interjection.
  
• Changed the definition of cath to refer to inserting a catheter rather than a clipping of cathode.
  
• Changed the definition of fap from an obsolete form of 'drunk' to the more commonly accepted one.
  
• Changed the definition of nerf from the motor racing term to the video games term.
  
• Removed the example from the definition of overbar.
  
• Removed 'see appendix' text from the definition of my.
  
• Improved the definition of un.
  
• Fixed an issue if a 'form of' definition specified a subsection, rendering that subsection as part of the word. Affected 30 words.
  

I probably wouldn't be doing this release for another week or two when I've made more stuff, but I'm in between big things, and nothing is waiting on anything else, so while we're on the front page of itch I thought I'd take this moment to drop what I've got. The biggest gameplay changes are probably that forests are no longer 90% boss spiders, the arachnophobia settings now have a preview and also apply to the current enemy instead of just future ones, and you can now fill most empty bottles with water. There's also some extra event interactions with some curses, some item reworks, and a lot of small things.

[h3]General:[/h3]

• Fixed a crash if you set the volume before any music has started. (It would crash after saving though, so technically no functionality was lost.)
  
• Clarified the wording on the shrine help screen.
  
• The player avatar on the player screen now blinks and does use animations if available.
  

[h3]Class selection:[/h3]

• Reduced the amount of flashing from appearing/disappearing UI elements if you yeet the class selection bar.
  
• Potentially fixed a rare crash in character creation colour customizer. Maybe just fixed a symptom of the issue though.
  
• Fixed item selections on the class selection screen showing the purple 'not normally for this class' glow if you'd previously played the main game that session and that class wouldn't be able to have it.
  

[h3]Overworld:[/h3]

• Added a one-time tutorial on opening the player screen explaining drag-drop use.
  
• Fixed the UI never getting unlocked if you quit to the main menu during the anomaly cutscene then immediately start a new game.
  
• Fixed quitting then continuing right at the start of the game causing you to lose curse/boon stuff because it didn't specifically save in between those two events.
  
• Fixed the player direction indicator on the map not scaling with the screen resolution.
  
• Added an option to enabled/disable the player direction indicator.
  
• Added the option to have the camera centre on the player when you arrive at your final destination. It's enabled in the default config, but wont auto-enable for pre-existing configs.
  
• Added an extra line to the travel tutorial, mentioning that you can move/drag the map around.
  

[h3]Forests:[/h3]

• Forests are no longer littered with boss spiders.
  
• Combat in forests no longer requires a boss flagged enemy to mark the location as complete.
  
• The number of enemies in forests can now vary by the same margin that crypt enemies can.
  
• Using a smoke bomb to run away from a chest in a forest no longer marks the location as complete, making getting the reward impossible.
  
• Fixed a world generation bug in forests and villages which could result in the entrances/exists leading to two locations, one of which potentially being a dead end.
  

[h3]Events:[/h3]

• Event button text can now support an extended glyph set.
  
• The beggar event now has unique outcomes based on if you have the curse of greed and/or explosive temper.
  
• The treant event now has unique outcomes based on if you have the curse of wood and/or pyromancer's curse.
  
• The merchant events now have an additional parting comment if it's happening outside of a static shop.
  
• The thorny lisp now makes the player speak with a lisp in events.
  
• The 'bury them' options in the paladin follow up events now increment time and come with a chance to find something anyway, depending on how long it's been.
  
• The end of the woodsman event now says 'Maybe stay on the path' instead of 'Be careful out there'.
  

[h3]Combat:[/h3]

• The 'well rested' statuses are now only consumed when they have a non-0 effect, after rounding, and counting max values.
  
• The arachnophobia option now applies to the current enemy, and has a visualisation.
  
• Fixed the gear UI effectively ignoring the 'touch double tap' option.
  
• Fixed the passives UI using the full list of passives to generate controller hotspots rather than the reduced list of relevant passives.
  
• Fixed the bubble particle effect for the alembic and the retort effectively applying resolution scaling twice.
  
• Fixed being able to press 'Give up' during the clean-up phase after having already pressed 'Finish' when close to death at the end of combat.
  
• The tile board no longer updates while it's completely hidden, so you don't miss important things happening on it. Like explosions.
  
• Added an '[A-Z]' legend on regular wildcards, to hopefully reduce situations where people don't realise what they are and don't check the tooltip.
  
• Fixed the stats display for post-combat not correctly hiding your hair when it should.
  
• Fixed being able to get negative amounts of gold from enemy drops. Only affected the random arcade if it gave you multiple unlucky passives.
  

[h3]Enemies:[/h3]

• Fixed enemy adventurers faking their death and running away if they died from being hit rather than from a status effect.
  
• It no longer does the 'boss pan' for spider nests.
  
• Added a separate status layer for explosion effects and bleed drain for sprites with the new style burn layer. Affects: adventurer, alot, fire elementals, slime, spiders, and the spider nest.
  

[h3]Items:[/h3]

• Calming potion: Fixed not appearing in drop tables. Changed sprite to use orb potion graphic not tube potion.
  
• Crystal ball: Now refreshes on submitting 71 tiles, refreshing away 142 tiles, drinking an insight potion, or a combination therein, rather than at the end of combat. Added a status icon to track it. Made the description less flowery. Tweaked the base of the icon.
  
• Insight potion: Partially full variants now reduce the crystal ball cooldown by 9*fill. Previously they did nothing except balance out the retort.
  
• Potion of clueless wisdom: No longer triggers the drink animation and a saves if there's no tiles that could be converted.
  
• Endless potion bag: Now an equipment rather than a passive, and gives a potion as an activated ability that recharges from killing 14 enemies, and gives more potions to choose from up to 3 at 18 kills.
  
• Magic alembic: Now does a slightly higher pitched than normal bubbles effect when it's ready to use.
  
• Tweaked the description of the thorny lisp to include and explain the actual thorn glyph.
  
• Fixed not actually being able to take an arbitrary number of arbitrarily hard bricks.
  
• Blood: Now listed as ephemeral rather than consumable.
  

[h3]Crafting:[/h3]

• You can now gather water in most empty bottles. Excluded are toxin/bleed related potions, and poison bottles.
  
• Changed the 'Clear' button to say 'Clear grid' instead, so people don't think it means clear the contents of the bottles.
  

[h3]Words:[/h3]

• Added hashbrown and hashbrowns.
  
• Added chainmail and chainmails.
  
• Added anise and derived terms to the wood dictionary
  
• Added anix.
  
• Added silvery and zincky and alternate spellings to the metal dictionary.
  
• Added flameout, outblaze, and derived terms to the fire dictionary.
  
• Removed newsbeat and newsbeats from the fire dictionary.
  
• Removed steelhead and steelheads from the metal and iron dictionary.
  

[h3]Definitions:[/h3]

• Added parsing for the rfv-sense Wiktionary template.
  
• Updated the definition of roon.
  
• Improved the definition of be.
  

This mostly just contains fixes for things that have come up from V40, but also contains some new content. Notably you can now manually configure the on-screen keyboard in great detail.



[h3]General:[/h3]

• Fixed the music thread maxing out a single CPU core.
  
• Added a layout customizer for the on-screen keyboard.
  
• Added a 'tutorial' message if you set award filters such that it's showing no awards.
  
• The 'Auto sell' button is now only active if you have anything it would sell, and shows an icon of one of the things it'd sell.
  
• Fixed a rare crash with the migration error screen.
  
• Fixed a migration error crash if there was an active run it was trying to create a stats entry for.
  
• Fixed a crash when returning to a shop that you'd previously sold an exotic potion to.
  
• Fixed a migration error if the old user config option for full screen was nil.
  
• Fixed a crash if you kill the woodsman.
  
• Renamed a location.
  

[h3]Sprites:[/h3]

• Fixed the top sprite layer not being drawn on the class selection, start menu, player inventory, and stats screens.
  
• Added a bonnet sprite for the adventurer.
  

[h3]Enemies:[/h3]

• Fixed the paladin and cultist counting as a demon for the purposes of the 'swear at a demon' achievement.
  
• Treant type enemies are now weak to fire words, and resistant to tree words, rather than weak to wood words.
  

[h3]Events:[/h3]

• Fixed the highwayman event being able to happen inside of villages.
  
• Paladin event changes:
  
• It can no longer happen 'outside' of locations with sub-worlds.
  
• This wont prevent the follow up events if you already found the paladin.
  
• The potion option now uses crafting data rather than hard coded item IDs to decide what's a health potion.
  
• If you choose the potion option, it now always prioritises giving them a fragile potion if you have one, before continuing in increasing fill level order as before to get to the required amount.
  
• The potion option now has 4 extra text variants if they only drink from 1 previously full bottle, based on the size of the bottle, with a generic fall-back for potential future potions that don't edit this (such as from mods).
  
• If the potion option results in them drinking a fragile potion it no longer gives you a non-existent 1-fill fragile potion variant.
  

[h3]Items:[/h3]

• Fixed the potion of clueless wisdom not having correct fill level data for crafting purposes.
  
• Changed the description of the gambeson and charmed gambeson now refer to 'combat' instead of 'adventures'.
  
• Changed the description of refreshing water to reference that they can be refilled at wells.
  
• Added to the single item versions of the cookies and firewood to mention that they stack.
  
• Fixed the bookkeepers bonnet always highlighting as if it's done anything.
  
• Scoring for the bassoon now only counts double pairs if it has more than one of a given letter, rather than more than one letter.
  
• Selling/activating items in the main inventory now updates the tooltip for what's under the cursor afterwards.
  
• Fixed leaving a combat with a smoke bomb giving you the full rewards as if you'd completed it.
  

[h3]Words:[/h3]

• Added clamato and clamatos.
  
• Added foliage, frond, leaf, phyllon, and around 19 related and derived terms to the tree dictionary.
  
• Added stamen, androecia, gynoecia, and derived terms to the tree dictionary.
  
• Added kerosene and related terms to the fire dictionary.
  
• Removed blood, blooding, bloodings, and bloods from the bones dictionary.
  

There’s nowt more magical than the lambent inscriptions of tangled sigils required to spell places like Ainderby Quernhow, Weedley Copse, or Upper Poppleton. A shiny whippet to the first of you to correctly identify which of these are real, and which were invented for “roguelite word puzzle RPG” Sternly Worded Adventures. Actually, scratch that. I’m not made of whippets, and you can just as easily find out yourself via the Steam demo. I think you should, if only because “I killed a slime by spelling out the word Toblerone” is easily in my top ten gaming moments of the year.

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