Greetings, blacksmiths!
6 months have passed since the early access release. We gathered a lot of feedback from our community. We have read every single Steam review, Steam discussion, and Discord message.
Seeing people out there helping out with their comments and solid feedback, we feel incredibly lucky and grateful.
Your feedback shaped this update, and the game itself, more than anything else. Today, we want to walk you through the Quality of Life improvements and show you exactly what you requested and what has changed.
Let's dive in.
Your Skill Now Matters
This was one of the most popular complaints we’ve received. You felt that the crafting process, which is the core of a blacksmithing game, didn't feel rewarding enough. You wanted your skill to matter in maybe one of the most fundamental minigames in Medieval Crafter: Blacksmith.
Crafting System Overhaul
We’ve completely overhauled the crafting system. Now every minigame calculates the output item's quality from your performance.
Forging: Forging had a luck-dependent quality output. Now hitting the critical points of the ore gives you combo points. A perfect craft without missing a single crit point nearly guarantees the highest quality of the item. (Satisfied Dwarf noise)
Mining: Mining was a simple hit-and-loot mechanic. Items dropped from ore deposits were getting stuck or going missing. Now every hit to the ore deposit gives you the loot directly to your inventory. Also, crit points spawn after your first hit. Hitting these spots also increases the amount of ore you get.
Assembly: We completely overhauled the quality calculations of assembly, as well. Now if you place two legendary items as input, that means you have a 100% chance to get a legendary item.
Sharpening: You can’t take anything for granted. With the new Sharpening minigame, you can make the weapon deadlier. But a mistake can also damage it. It’s all a balancing act.
Sales and Economy
The economy felt off and selling items felt unrewarding. Qualities and attributes of items had no effect on their prices and sale rates.
Orders and Sales Have Completely Changed
We have completely changed the order and sale system. Now, completing customer orders and selling items on racks has a much better balance.
Customer orders now have required bonuses too. A customer can request a legendary item or regular item with enchantment. They can also ask for another specific stat or simply ask for a dull item to pay less.
With this change, hopefully, stats and item quality have more meaning than before. Another feature complementing this is the ability to set prices of the items on the rack. This is where you can focus on grinding more gold with a clever pricing policy, or simply gun for specific bonuses on orders.
As the Economy 101 suggests, higher prices means lower sale chance and lower prices means higher sale chance. Alongside that, the qualities and attributes also affect the base prices of the items, which means that you can also put them on racks and forget about personal pricing efforts.
Hero Management Overhaul
Managing heroes was… painful. You had to go to the Heroes' Hall, search for the hero you wanted to edit, unequip all the items that needed repair, and the pain went on. We’ve finally solved it with much requested QoL updates. (Sorry, we didn’t think this in the first place.)
One Window to Rule Them All
A unified hero management screen has been added to your character window. Now you can access their equipment without pain. And most importantly, a mass repair button! One click to repair all equipped gear of a hero.
Bulk Crafting
One of the most requested features was bulk crafting as it felt very repetitive. Essential items like repair parts can now be crafted in batches. You can now set a quantity and begin crafting in bulk.
Audio Fixes
We’ve fixed the sound explosion when loading a game, equalized all the sound effect volumes, and most importantly, added an option to mute the dwarf noises.
Performance
There were some lag spikes and high loading times. We lowered vertex counts of many 3D models, compressed textures, mesh baked environments, and changed some character models. Those changes made a huge difference in frame rates and loading times.
Thank You! - See You on April 22!
We're a small team of three, and Medieval Crafter: Blacksmith exists thanks to your support. Every review, positive or negative, helped us understand what our game needed to become.
Update 1.0 isn't a patch or a sloppy wrap-up of a long Early Access period. It’s a tribute to everyone who believed in us during Early Access.
See you at the anvil.
The Medieval Crafter Team