This devlog explains details of an update 0.7.3 that's coming in early-mid September
Bodyparts
The new bodypart system will ensure that HP is not the only numeric indicator of how your character can survive the harsh world of Cross The World.
There are 6 bodyparts, head, torso, two arms and two legs. Each comes with 100 health and you get different grades of injury(minor, medium, severe, crippled) as its health goes down from various damage.
The injuries come with different types of penalties corresponding to each limb, like injury on arm will reduce the hit chance or leg with less dodge chance, but the injury penalties themselves aren't something that can kill the character they are only a disability.
This is a design decision to actually make things less complicated than having to deal with game's balancing and survival difficulty only hinged to the HP. And there's only one type of injury to the limb, not like we're going to be doing a medical or surgery simulator in the game. I mean it can be fun but kinda out of the scope of my game anyway.
Until now It was quite common that a sudden poison or bleeding debuff could instantly finish off your character randomly during or after combat, but with the bodypart system some damages can be offset to the limbs instead, making the game's balance more manageable.
New Equipments
4 new equipment slots are coming to Cross The World. Glove, Headgear, Ring and Boots.
And max inventory size has increased from 40 to 50 with new UI update.
Previously there wasn't much variety of equipment to choose from in Cross The World which severely weakened the essence of fun that derives from RPG, the joy of getting better equipment.
Many new equipment are coming and they will have each of their own spec and enchants to choose, it used to be that every equipment came with completely random enchant table but with the new update each category of equipment will come with specialization, i.e. Glove will be more likely to have hit chance than boots which will more likely to have movement speed or dodge.
Plus if you enchant your equipment now, it's going to increase the existing stat of the equipment rather than doing a random dice roll and getting completely enchant stats like previously which also hindered the meaning of equipment builds.
Now you are going to find the equipment from looting the bandits around the world or from the treasure chests in their camp or from underground dungeons, rather than just mining ore and build them from scratch or purchasing from NPCs. If you want the good ones, you will have explore the world more now.
New Perks
There isn't much to discuss about the new perks compared to what I spoke above.
Basically as you are getting more equipment types now, there will be more weapon-specific perks to choose from.
It's going to be what you can typically expect, like dagger perk that increases chance of damaging enemy bodypart and bleeding, that only is enabled when you are equipping a dagger, or a hammer's Q skill that does damage to multiple enemies in an area of effect.
This is to provide more tactical flavors to the combat while the good old' Roguelike/CRPG autoattack and movement mechanics stay the same.
School of Fish
It was often noted by the players that Fishing can be quite OP in terms of easiness of protein they can contribute to the player. Or making money way too easily from just fishing and selling off what you caught.
Now when the world is generated, random schools of fish tile are generated onto water in the world. This is the only tile you can catch fish with rarity higher than common and also the tile provides 25% boosted chance to catch a fish as well.
Try to find school of fish around the world, multiple of them too because there's 3% chance for school of fish to run away when you caught something from fishing.
Trades
The trade window used to show every single NPC in the world's list of items that they will buy at premium price, but now you are going to need to meet and talk to them regularly to keep it up to date.
Books to unlock recipes and perks
Instead of standing in front of bookshelves and tediously repeat the research action to unlock a new recipe, I've replaced it with book system. You can find the books from looting the treasure chests as well. Even more reason to go out into the wild and explore!