KeeperRL News

Besides Steam Workshop support, Alpha 29 is going to bring a large amount of new content and mechanics for your enjoyment!





KeeperRL will receive two new enemies with their own biomes and even dedicated soundtracks! They are: thieves in the desert, and a white dragon in an arctic setting. Both environments come with new mechanics and some juicy surprises! You can't build in different biomes yet, but it's something that will definitely happen at some point.





Totems are structures that place a certain buff or debuff on all friendly or hostile creatures in a given radius. The player has a healing totem available to build, and some locations feature other totems, like bleeding or blindness. They will mix up the combat mechanics in the game quite a bit. This is a feature that was suggested by player Amaze, if I'm not mistaken. Thanks!





Some (mostly major) enemies will drop body parts that can be used as ingredients to craft special items. This is in line with my efforts to give the player more rewards for exploration. Some of these crafted items will be very interesting :). The mechanic is fully moddable, of course.





Along the new arctic biome and the white dragon enemy comes the effect of freezing, which interacts with water and other creatures. The reverse is also true - you can melt snowmen and igloos using fireballs :)





Originally intended for a new type of demon, this skill allows you to infiltrate the enemy lines. Great for gathering intel or stealing stuff! It's not clear to me yet whether it will be activated by a ring or by some other means, and I have to make sure it can't be used to evade attacking enemies forever as the Keeper.



Shields have been present in the game for a few updates, but they needed an overhaul. Thanks to some helpful input from players, I've added a new combat mechanic that makes them more relevant. If a creature is attacked multiple times within one turn, its defense stat gets a penalty for each attack. This makes it easier to take down very strong enemies if you have a large team of average creatures. Shields counteract this effect, for example an adamantine shield will let you take on four enemies at once before your defense is lowered.





Plague is a similar effect to poison, but it won't kill most creatures (and some are totally immune). It's also highly contagious. Have fun with it :).





You can now switch between three enemy aggression levels, with the lowest one completely turning off enemy attacks. The medium level will keep the normal aggression, and the extreme level will cause every active enemy to attack within a few thousand turns, provided that their population is high enough.

The last few KeeperRL patches improved modding support to the point where you can change or replace the majority of the game’s content. I’m very happy that a few hardcore fans jumped at the opportunity and published some really cool things, and the most popular mod is played nearly as much as the vanilla game!

The game features a very simple interface for downloading mods, but a far better framework made for mod sharing is the Steam Workshop, which supports commenting, ranking, subscribing, searching and all the other things necessary for a great sharing experience. And thus I brought the coding guru Krzysiek onboard again, to integrate it into KeeperRL. Once at it, we also plan to support sharing of retired maps through the Steam Workshop.

I hope to release a testing build integrated with Steam Workshop in late August/early September, so we can work with mod creators and players to make sure the experience of content exchange is as perfect as possible.

For players that don’t use Steam, all content will also be hosted on the keeperrl.com server, as usual, but without the extra functionality that Steam Workshop supports. I feel bad about creating this inequality, but since more than 95% of players play on Steam, it would be a mistake not to make use of the extra free features that it provides.

This is a bug fixing patch that gets rid of some common issues found in Alpha 28.

Please note that the first three items take effect only in newly started games.

• Fixed dark elf ally recruitment.
  
• Removed temples from the home map (priest was too dangerous).
  
• Fixed ghost spawning in ruins.
  
• Fixed issue with removing some tree trunks.
  
• Fixed flickering immigrant button glitch.
  
• Fixed a crash caused by non-humanoid creatures trying to drop items.
  
• Fixed a typo in the gloves item plural name and one in the build menu.
  
• Vanilla mod files were converted to DOS line endings.
  

KeeperRL Alpha 28 is out! This update focuses on modding support, and also features new content and many quality-of-life improvements.

At this point most of KeeperRL's content has been exported to data files and can be modded. Mods can be shared at keeperrl.com and downloaded directly from the game! A few veteran players have already published a mod with massive amounts of new content.

I'd like to thank everyone involved in crash testing this patch, sending bug reports and suggestions. Your help was invaluable!

Scroll down for a detailed change log.



If you would like to continue your saved game from Alpha 27, you can opt-in into the "Alpha 27 save compatibility" BETA branch under the game's properties in Library. Make sure to opt-out of the branch to go back to Alpha 28 when you're done!

• Merged "campaign", "free play" and "endless" modes. Endless enemy waves can be set to attack after winning the game or from the start.
• Improved the spell system, with multiple spell schools and many added spells.
• Demon rituals are now performed by regular minions in order to attract demons and to heal them.
• Improved AI for spell casting and potion throwing.
• Spirit/ghost creatures have a separate health type, called materialization, with dedicated health potions and can be healed using demon rituals.
• Healer team member AI does a better job at not engaging in fights.
• Added rare spawning of the village guardian aka "witchman".

• Black dragon enemy.
• Gates/double doors.
• Fire trap.
• Orc healer minion
• Orc shaman renamed to orc mage.
• Battle mage and fire mage minions for the White Keeper.
• Fighter abilities: "swap positions" and "shove".
• Reworked "summon spirit" spell of the shaman and unicorns to summon ghosts of actual creatures.
• Healing and Heal other spells have been merged into a single spell with two upgrades.
• Group healing spell.
• Cure blindness spell.
• Magic missile spell upgrades.
• Teleport spell.
• Pacify spell.
• Magic cancellation spell and effect, preventing another creature from casting spells.
• Pull spell.
• Firewall spell.
• Magical damage ring, which transforms melee damage of a creature into magical damage during a fight.

• Added a new mod menu that allows downloading mods from the server.
• Added support for adding new sprites in mods.
• Campaign and endless enemies are now moddable.
• All furniture, traps and other constructions are moddable.
• Better support for creative or "cheating" modes: placing minions, and items, and immediate digging in the building menu.
• Improved reporting errors in mods.
• Retired dungeons contain information on which mods are required to load them.
• Some sprites, such as all of the keeper sprites, support color variants without having to modify the sprite itself.
• Added support for "magical floors" that cause a "LastingEffect" on the creature standing on them.

• Added a search box and other improvements to the list of retired dungeons.
• Improved player name entry text field.

• Multiple optimizations for larger dungeons.
• Online highscores are not downloaded anymore at the start of the game to improve startup time.
• Made White Keeper animals visible in minions tab and obey quarters.
• Fixed splitting team if undead team members can't travel due to daylight.
• Fixed a bug that caused traveling team members to be transferred back to base randomly.
• Fixed base retirement crashes.
• Fixed showing gender names in character menu.
• Fixed issue with increasing adventurer training levels beyond limits.
• Fixed gas emitting in poison gas trap.

I've uploaded a pre-release build of Alpha 28 for all three platforms. I invite all seasoned players to take a look and post their feedback in this thread or in the comments below.

Please don't opt in if you are new to the game, as this build is very unstable, and the tutorial doesn't work at the moment.

To opt-in into the build, please go into the game's properties, BETA tab, and choose the "dev" branch.