Build 14.1.22 Live!

Our improved QA process is working. We delayed this build from yesterday because we found serious issues. Then today we did a full test sweep and found several serious issues. We fixed them and had to work a little late, but here it is!

I'll say it like Apple does about their phones every product announcement "This is the best build of Archmage Rises to date."

Improvements

Improved: You can manually save the game at any point (not combat) by pressing F5. Unfortunately it looked like the game crashed while it froze up and saved your game. We made it much nicer now with a popup and log entry, etc. It’s real pro now. Real pro.
Improved: save file upgraders work from 14.1.19 to 14.1.22, so you should be able to play your worlds and saves in this build.
Improved: Added Error Codes to the game. This allows us to know roughly where the problem is. You currently don’t see them, but when you submit errors through the game we get them and it automatically flags them for us in our Jira tool.
Fixed: a massive issue with monsters appearing on the map but you couldn’t interact with them. This was due to an icon duplication problem (complicated). The reason you couldn’t interact with them was because it wasn’t real, it was just an icon.
Trail rations no longer free! And there was much rejoicing! This was due to the pricing algorithm being based on how much wellbeing an item provides you. A food item or nights stay that boosts your wellbeing should be more valuable. Unfortunately negative wellbeing was tanking the value making it zero. The pricing is now only for +positive well being.
Improved: New UI slider for transferring quantities of things (gold gifting). Try to restrain your enthusiasm.
Improved: Increased NPCs knowing where someone or a town is from 33->50%
Improved: Increased "knowledgeable" NPCs (Innkeeper, Mayor, Merchant) knowing where something is to 75%
Removed: Bandits temporarily gone from the game. They're too buggy and ill tempered.
Improved: Resource placement logic and values. It was too rare to have resources (metal, stone, wood) and when you did get them, there was a TON of them (like 100+ metal) turning the game into Resource Hunter Rises. Now roughly 30% of tiles have between 1-3 resources BUT the amount of resources is 3-6. This will later be improved to be skilled base, allowing you to come back and revisit places with a higher skill level. Sort of like in ancient times they could only mine gold at the surface, but with better technique could go deeper and get more later.
Improved: [Dungeons] When at a staircase room, pressing Shift+W will let you go upstairs/downstairs without needing to click on the staircase. This is helpful in buggy situations where the staircase did not get placed or simply isn't there is no click event to be triggered
Improved: There were too many books being dropped in dungeons, switched it to 1 per library room.

Fixed

Fixed: Flow tiles (rivers, lava) no longer move around on the map because they are properly cached. Wow! That only took forever to fix!
Fixed random number generation which could have led to super subtle hard to find bugs
Fixed: Dungeon loot algorithm. One day we’ll get it right.
Fixed: Combat issue when player destroyed some non-essential thing like a rock
Fixed: Issue with saving and quitting while autosave is running
Fixed: Goblins were apparently Humans! Put them back in their place.
Fixed: Birthday wasn’t actually working on your.. um… birthday. Oops.
Fixed: Ambush enemies wouldn’t die.
Fixed: Super weird dungeon movement/teleporting when clicking on a door.
Fixed: Quests with time limits weren’t loading correctly from save. Now they do!
Fixed: Quests getting nulled out and showing a dummy quest of Life Aspiration. You should never see this again, and if you do it’s a big problem.
Fixed: Town music and ambient sounds now transition properly between scenes and locations. No more cacophony hurting yer ears!
Fixed: Removed ridiculous startup things in the player log, like “the battlefield has gained Fishing from unknown source”.
Fixed: Various combat bugs. We’re working on a new combat system for Early Access so these are BandAids (TM).

Known Issues

Demo Quest Final Battle Issues: Conclave ending works. Selfish ending works. Renegade option has issue when conclave ambush battle occurs the guards in it hit 0 HP and don't die. That's not new, but the work around of console command "win.combat" failed to end the combat
Skills like Perception are definitely handed out too often and you can quickly boost your stealth skill into the stratosphere
Fishing doesn't work
Light spell icon gets lost loading a save game
Player log text disappears on save/load
Market - prices don’t change as you buy and sell
Relationships decay very quickly making it almost pointless to try to maintain one. That’s pretty dumb, we still need to fix it.
Clicking a weapon in inventory doesn’t equip it. BUT you just click a hand and it will show all equipable weapons, or drag it over.
Dungeons aren’t spawning locked doors, making levers useless and no keys being placed to find. They’re supposed to be funner!
Most spells need better tuning and balancing
Building a tower is supposed to come with a default layout, but it is completely missing, meaning you have to build from scratch everything, placing doors and a bedroom, floors, etc. Quite tedious.
NPCs don’t send letters to you. Even if you are friends. They just aren’t that into you.
Can’t do the final battle twice in the same game session. Have to quit the game completely, then it will spawn second time. Sorry speedrunners!