Progress Report: Alraune + Dungeon Difficulty

More Plants

Up to now there were four plants, two alraunes, a flower, and the vines. Ad part of the content expansion, this now gets updated. First, there are three extra flowers (acid, love, and fire) each with unique effects:

Second there are five new Alraune variants (warrior, devout, alchemical, maternal and horticultural). Especially the last two are unique. The former has an incubate ability that stays active between dungeons (and gives an item after a couple of them), while the latter continuously spawns vines as reinforcements.

Finally, there are two new big Alraunes (warrior and alluring). The latter functions a bit like the Flesh in Darkest Dungeon 2. It gives of an alluring scent that triggers your adventurers to come closer (if they fail a WIL check). If they are in first rank, they can't help but skip their turn and smell the flowers.

Elite+ Difficulty

There are two common complaints about the difficulty of the game, it is too hard for newbies and too easy for experts. There's a reason for this. Dungeons have four difficulties (Novice - Adept - Veteran - Elite), and there are three encounter difficulties (Easy - Medium - Hard). 

From the easy side, even on Novice you could get some Medium encounters. While those are uncommon and mostly can be avoided, new players don't know which ones they are. So that can be solved easily, Novice dungeons now only exist of Easy encounters. Note that Easy encounters are very easy, most often they don't even have 4 enemies, but it should help new players get used to the game. 

From the hard side, I added a new encounter difficulty: "Elite". These are very difficult encounters, most often containing resources or special field effects. They will now spruce up the Elite dungeons. This allows to spread the difficulty a bit, Novice dungeons are a lot easier, Adept slightly easier, Veteran more difficult, and Elite will now contain some of these Elite encounters.

Then finally, there is the Elite+ difficulty. These consist only of Elite encounters and have a larger dungeon size. Gear rewards have also been shifted, so Elite only gives Very Rare items while Elite+ gives the Legendary ones. You can finish the game without ever fighting an Elite+ dungeon(if you're patient) and they serve as a challenge for those with "meta" teams. This should solve the requests for more difficulty.

Most enemy types don't have elite encounters yet, so for the non-slime non-plant encounters the game falls back to Hard encounters. This means that the Elite+ difficulty won't be as hard yet.

Next

The Alraune update, and mostly the bugfixing after the public release took quite some time (and I didn't even get all of them), so the seedbed boss dungeon is coming next week. Here's the dungeon layout already though:

Changelog

If you're updating, please be careful for wearers of the Equine Brand and Staff of Unconditional Support, you may want to unequip them!

Major:

• 10 new Alraune/Plant enemies, and around 50 new Alraune/Plant encounters.
• Elite+ encounters, see above.

Minor:

• New equipment: Safety Amulet (Increases kidnap chance but teleports the adventurer to the guild when kidnapped)
• New quirks: Ascetic and Vain (depend on (Very) Common equipped gear)
• New custom rules: No Retreat and Dangerous Grapples
• Iron Chests now have a small chance to be openable by default and give extra loot in that case
• Improved enemy info to also include love and durability damage.
• There's now an inventory summary so you can see the loot value, thanks Haraberu!
• You can now see the progress of goals like complete dungeon with loot or without damage, thanks Haraberu!
• Dungeon and encounter effects are now shown during combat.
• Updated German, Russian, and Chinese translations.
  
• Equine brand is permanent but no longer forces horse.
• Unconditional support forces mage.

Bugfixes:

• Cursed rings deleted equipment on equip.
• Cursed ring weapons weren't deleted when the ring was removed.
• Cursed ring weapons and classes showed in the catalog.
• Improved the performance of the Vine transformations.
  
• Save compatibility fix for cases where the pregnancy belly or breasts got stored incorrectly.
• Some tokens didn't show up in the glossary.
• Dayscript for mana and favor gave gold instead.
• Encyclopedia fixes.
• Glasses - Broken Glasses evolution didn't work.
• Apologize token could cause animations of the user to cease.
• Coat of Invisibility didn't hide the full sprite.
• All or Nothing and Winner Suit were exhibitionist friendly while rubberpuppy suit wasn't.
• Crown of Relaxation set max_stat DEX to 18 instead of 10.
• Visual errors with size0 boobs of many items.
• Straitjacket visual issue with yokes or armbinders.
• Goals of non-hidden cursed items are shown (e.g. prisoner tattoo) before equip.
• Cursed classes in stagecoach persisted across saves.
• Animal kill goal didn't show up in the Provision Roster.
• Skimpy bikini had +1 always.
• Breeder Slimes looked weird.
• Stray pixels with Cowprint Boots.
• Micro bikini was broken on size2 boobs.
• Changed some traitnames to fit their box.
• Cuffs of Temperance showed over the weapon.
• Enemygroups with 8 enemies would show over chests.
• Tooltip improvement in Church realignment.
• Fixed text after losing gold through curio.
• Speedup for tavern bunny set.
• Party was still a Resource instead of RefCounted.
• Heel Training debuffed magDMG instead of SPD.
• Transform undoing will set the class to the last newly added class.
• Gothic Choker and Gothic Corset weren't always functioning correctly.
• Souris B1-BIS had the wrong icon.
• Ratkin Stronghold was automatically cleared.
• The Provision Roster allowed selecting locked jobs.
• There was no tooltip for boss dungeons.
• Stagecoach buttons only got colored upon mouse over.

If you want early access to these changes (and a debug console), support me here:

PATREON | SUBSCRIBESTAR