It's my pleasure to announce that KeeperRL Alpha24 is out! It's another big gameplay patch, bringing in many new features:
- Overhauled prisoner system. Enemies are explicitly tagged to be captured, and they retain their identity after becoming prisoners. Read more about the system here.
- Improved full control mode handling. Battles can be played in a proper turn-based manner. Read more here.
- Changes in mining: new challenges, and better progression. Read more here.
If you would like to continue your saved game from Alpha23, you can opt-in into the "Alpha23 save compatibility" BETA branch under the game's properties in Library. Make sure to opt-out of the branch to go back to Alpha24 when you're done!
The full change log:
Gameplay
- Prisoners retain their identity and can join your side if tortured.
- Prisoners can be captured outside of player's dungeon.
- Player must tag specific enemies that are to be captured.
- Prisoners can perform work like crafting, if they have appropriate skills.
- Prisoners can escape if there are too many compared to fighter units.
- Most mineral veins are guarded by enemies like ants, dwarves and golems, who will attack when the player tries to mine the vein.
- As most minerals are guarded, geology tech is removed.
- Changed steel to adamantium, which is mined and not smelted from iron.
- Added 'quarters', which can be used to create mini-dungeons for selected minions.
- Added 'hard rock' tiles, which take longer to dig out, deeper in the mountain.
- Added iron and adamantine doors.
- Creatures have explicit intrinsic attacks, like fangs or fists that can be chosen via UI when attacking.
- Time system is changed to explicit turns and 'half-turns' for easier control during battle.
- Creatures only have 3 speed options: half-speed, normal, and double-speed. (speed attribute is removed)
- Creatures with double-speed perform their second move immediately after the first.
- Boulders don't wound huge creatures like dragons.
- Some villages have a chance to be generated on the 'bones' of others.
- Healer AI prioritizes healing creatures that stand directly next to an enemy.
- Increased spell damage of legendary minions.
- Added maximum range for bows.
- Decreased mana regeneration rate in free mode when mana regeneration option is turned on.
- Kobolds are stronger and have spears.
- Improved eating AI, minions will try to leave the pigsty after having eaten.
- Changed AI code involving swapping positions, creature's won't get in each other's way so much anymore.
- Made cooperative AI assign better positions when mining close to each other.
- Removed tech number limit based on library size.
- Minions respond immediately to the player manually changing their activity (including waking up).
- Minion wakes up when it is assigned new equipment.
- Added hand torches.
- Burning objects emit light!
- Improved logic of injuring non-living creatures, which fixes the problem of killing them taking too long.
- Added caps to how much of the basic stats dopplegangers can inherit.
- Added minimum turn requirement to some higher level immigrants, which causes more low level immigrants to be presented early in the game.
- 'Prioritize task' order makes an imp drop their current task immediately.
- Decreased the 'unavailable zone' width on the map border to reduce memory usage.
- Reduced amount of stone dropped by boulder to avoid generating free stone.
- Reduced amount of gold dropped by demon dwellers.
- Made minions do other tasks when there is nothing to craft.
- Statues cost gold instead of mana.
- Creatures and items are teleported out of inaccessible tiles.
- Added the ability to push away smaller creatures.
- Removed the 'stun ray' spell.
- Added 'demonology' tech that unlocks demon shrines.
- Hallucination effect also grants telepathy.
- Added baby spiders and blind children to giant spider's den.
- Vampire lord drops a scroll of darkness, which causes a creature to become permanently immune to sunlight.
- Ghost gets a 'touch of insanity' attack, which causes creatures to be hostile to everyone.
- Succubus gets a 'touch of love' attack, which causes creatures to become peaceful.
- Robe gives spell resistance.
- Added invisible alarm trap to castle.
- Added priest to castle.
- Pig corpses don't emit gas.
- All enemy creatures heal slowly over time.
Interface
- New UI for managing team members: adding and removing from team, changing move order.
- New UI for interacting with other creatures, like attacking, chatting, etc.
- Added creature status (leader/fighter/civilian) highlights and descriptions.
- Added tabs to view team members.
- Added new buttons for toggling and exiting control mode.
- Attribute bonuses from equipment and buffs are visible in the UI.
- Added a simple animation for when creatures are wounded or tortured.
- Limb losses are represented on HP bar for non-living creatures, which don't have health and have to be chopped into pieces.
- New sprites for the demon tribe.
- New buttons under the minimap to open world map or scroll to keeper's location.
- Boulders can be pushed using the mouse.
- Summoned creatures remaining 'time to live' is explicitly shown in the UI.
- Total inventory weight and maximum capacity is displayed in control mode.
Fixes
- Endless mode highscore takes into account only time spent defending the base, and not wandering around.
- Optimized and fixed various issues with creature pathfinding.
- Optimized field-of-view calculations, which speeds up the game considerably.
- Optimized world generation.
- Stopped doppleganger from being able to consume itself.
- Doppleganger doesn't inherit effects granted by rings and other equipment.
- Fixed ancient spirit's spell attack.
- Minions pick up potions of melee, spell and ranged resistance.
- Chests and coffins spawn creatures further away if adjacent tiles are blocked.
- Reinforce wall order is removed when wall is marked to be dug out.
- Disallowed destroying bridges.
- Fixed digging orders persisting when tile was destroyed by someone else.
- Fixed trap removal and building floors under traps.
- Fixed 'sleep on torch' UI bug.
- Fixed level generation crashed caused by trying to place a blind creature.
- Fixed marking campaign base map as conquered when village is destroyed.
- Fixed drawing question marks on the main map.
- Fixed red dragon appearing on green dragon's place in the campaign.
- Increased female keeper spell damage to match the male version.
- Fixed issue with calculating influence area in campaign map.