Trawel News

v0.8.b_9 has been released to beta, v0.8.b_8 pushed to default.
Report issues and bugs in the steam forums.
Pictured: Slice of Greap Debug Map. Greap has a more vertical layout versus Eoano, and lacks teleporters. The upper grouping of towns is mostly barren at the moment.

This update has been cooking for a while now! While it lacks a centralized theme, it can be grouped into a few categories.
[h2]Worldgen[/h2]

• new towns! Greap now is filled with towns. Half of them are not yet featured, but you can still travel between them, and build your own Lots.
  
• notable towns:
  1. Lunek, a creepy port city home to the Hunter's Guild and Witch Hut.
     
  2. Gopuo, with a Rigged Tower Lighthouse.
     
  3. Reahe, a merchant stall town with a Blacksmith and Enchanter.
     
  4. Mikol, a palace town with a Dungeon, Hero Guild, and Merchant Guild.
     
  5. Beola, a bustling city with a Doctor and Library.
     
  6. Xeyn, a farming town beset by unseen forces.
     
  7. Eaqu, a partially complete small town with a Graveyard.
• new connection types! In addition to normal Roads, you can travel on small Paths or hitch a ride in a Caravan. These have different travel times, and Caravans require loading, just like how Ships require loading and unloading, and Teleports need a ritual to be completed.
  
• World distances increased to make travel more meaningful and progress the world state a bit quicker when moving about. Remember that you can turn off realtime displays if watching the sunlight proves annoying!
  

[h2]Town Features[/h2]

• new feature! The Enchanter: Can enchant weapons and armor for world currency and Aether. Can also convert Aether into world currency at prices better than what Stores will offer normally.
  
• new feature! Hunter's Guild: The additions here will be gone into more depth in the 'quests' section, but this Guild's gem of choice is the Amber, and they focus on Cleanse quests, primarily against vampires and harpies.
  
• new service! Forest variant of Altar, with its own offering behavior and blessings.
  
• new service! Blacksmiths can Temper Armor to remove negative qualities for a price of world currency and Amber.
  
• new service! Inns can now have their rooms rented out, which comes with Bathing and Waiting.
  
• misc! Witch Hut has tweaked potion recipes, Corpsebloom fungus is a new plant.
  
• new node shape! Rigged Tower implements a Lighthouse.
  
• changed services! Traveling Features no longer just copy other features: Celebrations let you get free drinks by scavenging and watch duels, Fights give you a breadth of opponents to choose from, Oracles ramble for free, and Stores still act like stores.
  

[h2]Quests[/h2]

• new venues! Hero Guilds, Rogue Guilds, and Hunter Guilds now offer quests, with different chances of different types of quests! Notably, their Fetch quests differ in both the legality and rewards. This also applies to existing quest board locations like the District, Inn, and Merchant Guild!
  
• rewards! All Quests now grant larger amounts of currency. Amber is offered as a reward for Hunter quests, and Reputation rewards got increased overall.
  
• new target! Cleanse quests now offered for Unicorns.
  
• new reactions! You can now get stopped by bandits wanting to ruin hero's movements, competition that seeks to take your ill-gotten gains for themselves, and vampires who wish to slay those who might slay them. These all count for Cleanse quests, which should make it slightly easier to complete those by doing other quests in the meantime!
  
• Quest Reactions grace period was lengthened to avoid besieging you with events back-to-back. Reactions are now weighted, lowering the chances of getting told directions over and over.
  
• Quest Targets now prefer certain Features over others (Districts, Inns, etc)- and more importantly are less likely to be in the same room as the person who gave you the quest. They can appear 0 to 5 towns away, preferring the middle range band.
  
• reputation! Reputation for killing world entities has generally been increased, especially positive reputation. This should feel more accurate to how much presence you are exerting in the world, with higher level enemies giving smoother scaling than before.
  

[h2]Misc[/h2]

• 'Really Fight' and 'Really Attack' let you view a preview of the opponent's equipment, so you can choose to back out with this information.
  
• Wounds reworded for clarity.
  
• new wounds! Blackened, Jolted, Shivering.
  
• Added new Skills: Life Mage, Armor Mage, Belly, Deadly Aim, Potion Chugger.
  
• Added new Feats: Glutton, Shaman.
  
• Combat attack notes are now a separate option from combat debug, and on by default.
  
• The Expanded Bag now lets you melt items within it into Aether, either from the Player Menu or when looting if your Expanded Bag is full.
  
• Added Simplified attack display type that displays hit roll, total delay, and total damage.
  

Sorry for the wait, had a few irl ailments- dragon out! o7

v0.8.b_8 has been released to beta, v0.8.b_7 pushed to default.
Report issues and bugs in the steam forums.

[h3]On Announcement Naming:[/h3]
It occurs to me that it isn't Summer everywhere*, but also more significantly the seasonal boundary was crossed. There isn't much 2023 left overall, so I've changed it from 'Summer 2023' to just 2023.
Somewhat unrelated I regret numbering the versions and sprints in different indexing schemes, hence dropping that as well. They were both only one off anyway, and I don't foresee that changing anytime soon, even if I do hotfixes.
*citation needed
[h3]Notes[/h3]
Now, on with the Patch Notes:

• Arenas received updates, the menu is modern, and there has been a major behavioral change around time. You can no longer take part in fights that are super far off, preventing accidentally advancing time. Instead, you can wait 24 hours at a time, even when there is a fight soon. The new rematches include NPCs that fought without you being there (which now happens if you don't make a bout), and they will leave after they train and level up enough.
  
• Furthermore, multi-round arenas now once again simulate all the rounds, even the ones you don't see. This used to be a mechanic before Trawel was even a game, but it was simplified into faking it at some point. They can take rematchers as contestants, but never in the first round against a player, to force the game to give the player a chance if they have (probably unwittingly) fed an NPC.
  
• Lot menu has been updated as well, and the behavior of collecting money from owned features has been standardized and the values have been tweaked.
  
• All features can now support fluff intro/outro text. Right now this is mostly used for named Inns and Stores, but some Doctors, Libraries, and other features use it as well. This can be disabled as a display setting.
  
• Saves no longer display sub-second values, and display day of week and timezone instead.
  
• Autosaves now occur within node exploration features. They do not occur in any other feature, and like with normal autosaves, it will only check once you enter a scene. In this case, this is having the node menu display.
  
• Lances, Drudger fishing spears, and Drudger anchors updated to have their own attack stances. This means that only Shovels and fists (for flesh golems) need migration to the new attack system. Unicorn horns will likely use lances as their base forever.
  
• Tactics have been broadened to allow for attack effects outside of skill usage. No attacks are set to currently do this due to AI balance concerns, but Takedown was added as another effect.
  
• A few new skills such as Twinned Takedown and updated Counter.
  
• Two new archetypes, Hired Hatchet and Fighting Fury.
  
• Archetypes now come with 2 skills + tactics/skill stance/3rd skill, as well as stats. Previous player-capable archetypes adjusted. Archmage archetype remains distinct.
  
• More fluff insults added to the species of Trawel to try to give the world a sense of history.
  
• As always major but unnoticeable bugs like materials that didn't have weapons never being rolled for armors; as well as more impactful niche bugs like deleting but not replacing skill configurations leading to oddness.
  

dragon out o7

v0.8.b_7 has been released to beta, v0.8.b_6 pushed to default.
Report issues and bugs in the steam forums.

Unfortunately, this sprint saw several developmental blockers, like the wiring in the main PC falling apart and Java 17 resisting (very successfully).

The pace of updates has also been slowing down overall, so unless something changes, expect them to be closer to two weeks instead of one week.

The former has been dealt with but Trawel is still stuck on Java 8, for now.

Sad Patch Notes:

• Changed the way the game saves. This may have been a downgrade, the main intention was to allow updating to Java 17+, and that is still out of reach, so this might need to be reverted if saving has new issues.
  
• Node Features display 'inward and outward' to show if you are moving away from or toward the entrance in most cases- this is technically just displaying the 'floor', but in all current Node Shapes besides Tower, that is just how far away from the entrance you are.
  
• All Eoano towns (besides one intentionally left out town) have town lore snippets now. Hemo and Beal had their map location moved a bit to make more thematic sense.
  

Hopefully next sprint will be more fruitful, dragon out o7

v0.8.b_6 has been released to beta, v0.8.b_5 pushed to default.
Report issues and bugs in the steam forums.

Known Issues Updates: Currency rewards in node features are still mostly out of date, but exploration features did get fixed. There are still a few unintentionally unbalanced multifights in the game, such as wolf packs.

Partial Changelog:

• As always, misc unreported bug fixes.
  
• Steam Achievements received a quality pass, and several were added, along with new leaderboard items.
  
• World updates ('WorldGen'):
  
  1. Eoano gained 2 connecting towns on existing islands, 1 whole new island with 3 towns, and larger focus on lore and thematic design, including tweaking what features exist in many current towns.
     
  2. Greap got less attention than Eoano but was still changed, plan is to focus on its status as 'world 2' after the 'world 1' Eoano is mostly settled.
     
• Feature updates included in World changes:
  
  • Districts can house sub stores and have a defined reformation feature. For example, the Better Futures Company Camp turns into the Better Futures Company Headquarters, a Merchant Guild office.
    
  • Gardens start filled and slowly replenish as the townspeople tend to them.
    
  • Node features had rarity tweaks to their nodes, and now display their level range along with their size. More significantly, nodes can now gate progress, although currently there is no reason to not break down every door you find, and no cost to doing so. The Ancient Queen boss was added to one of the towers in the new Eoano island.
    
  • Altars are now dedicated to different primal forces, in this update the Forest primal force was added to the old Sky force.
    
  • Doctors no longer charge to diagnose, cost lowered, use modern menu now.
    
  • Standardized internal code for exploration features, allowing them to have weighted odds and more detailed behavior without maintenance nightmares. (IE, they got both of those mechanics and any later added ones will automatically have those mechanics as well.) Events got cleaned up a bit, as mentioned in the currencies known issues update.
    
  • Blacksmith has better feedback text, pricing on upgrading items changed to aether AND world currency, but less world currency.
    
• Improved item and stat displays, especially in regards to breaking up their text with colors.
  
• Tutorial Text and Feature Description text separated, latter now displays in paren instead of on a new line, making it much less intrusive.
  
• Legacy adapter behavior extended to music, notably for the docks.
  
• Barely worth mentioning, but titles for town helper were added, and how champion title code works has been changed.
  

As you may have noticed, this update took slightly longer than usual, but not significantly so. Dragon signing off o7

v0.8.b_5 has been released to beta.
Report issues and bugs in the steam forums.
Note: The previous beta was shown to be a bit less stable than expected after some live playtests, so it is not being pushed to the default branch this week.

Known Issues Updates: Currency rewards in nodes/exploration features are still mostly out of date. Un-even fight balance was partially solved for dungeons, but not other instances.

Partial Changelog:

• Many insidious bugs that crashed in certain contexts, or did not apply numbers properly in a way that was around correct, but not actually correct.
  
• Picking archetypes and feats shows which skills you already have.
  
• Looting now displays your current capacity usage.
  
• Saves now have a timestamp instead of date.
  
• Added an 'adventuring party' system to tower dungeons. (Can also be used on other dungeon types, but currently only tower dungeons have need of them.) You can hire companions for a token fee, and they will aid you in the 'high security' checkpoints in the dungeon, as well as the boss. They take a share of all the loot in the dungeon, but even the odds in the mass battles. They will leave if you do not visit the dungeon for a while. Fighting alongside them will increase the duration they wait at the dungeon for you before leaving. They die permanently and cannot be taken outside the dungeon, but you hire from the actual world occupants of that town, and after leaving, they return to wandering the world in their own story.
  
• Re-added random wandering behavior of AI. They tend to group around inns, residential districts, and dungeons with the party feature enabled.
  
• A deliberate balance choice to tweak neck and head damage multipliers from 3x to 2.5x was made. This may require further reduction, to reduce the 'neck meta' of unexpected instant kills.
  
• Legacy behavior was added to nodes and town features, most now have another feature designated as fallback art, and thus display time passing better.
  
• Examining weapons closely now has a more comprehensive display and itemization of attacks.
  
• Armor qualities have been re-added with more substance, and now are closer to weapon qualities, with the notable exception that partially negative qualities (flaws/traits/qualities) exist.
  
• Level display has changed from words to a number, the word tier now indicates the number of weapon/armor qualities. This means players no longer have to remember that a shoddy weapon is better than a crude weapon but less than a poor weapon to determine level, since examining weapons and armor displays their traits fully. This system was in place before, but only for weapons greater than 'legendary' tier, and it started at 'legendary' rather than level 1.
  
• Old leveling display adjusted to show traits/qualities/flaws at a glance.
  

Example of new display of armor traits:


Dungeon with NPC friends, my friends