Patch 1.3 - The Gods You Never Met
Some of you have completed well over two hundred quests and still hadn't met every character.
No, you weren't cursed. The Gods of Randomness were simply being particularly enthusiastic about their job.
Four of the ten quest givers - LackLuster, Bill A. Dont, Cataclyzia and Iseratu - could be extremely difficult to encounter because of how the quest rotation handled character selection.
They were always there. They had their quests. The dice just weren't particularly interested in showing them to you.
I've adjusted the system to make the rotation fairer, so every character has a proper chance to appear without turning the game into a predictable checklist.
Four characters were far too easy to miss
All ten quest givers are now properly accounted for in the rotation, with special attention given to characters you haven't encountered yet.
All ten characters are now in rotation.
Five achievements that were effectively impossible for some players to obtain are now obtainable - the first-quest achievements for those four characters, plus the "complete a quest for every character" achievement.
Your existing save carries over. No reset, no new game required.
If you're returning to an old save, characters you have never met are now pushed to the front of the queue, so you should encounter the missing ones within your next few quest turnovers.
The Gods of Randomness have been politely asked to stop hoarding them.
The quest rotation is now actually fair
Previously, character selection relied heavily on random chance with very little consideration for who had already appeared.
Which is technically random.
It is also a wonderful way to make one character follow you around for an hour while another apparently moves to a different universe.
I've changed the rotation so that:
Characters you have never met are prioritised heavily and will appear much sooner.
Characters who are behind on completed quests are weighted to catch up, so relationships progress at a more reasonable pace.
A character who just left a slot will no longer immediately reappear in it.
Once a character's twenty quests are exhausted, their repeat quests now cycle in order instead of being selected completely at random - no more getting the exact same request twice in a row.
Randomness is still there.
It has simply been given some adult supervision.
[QUEST HINTS]
The quest panel now tells you what to do
Previously, if you didn't have the ingredient a character wanted, the confirm button simply greyed out and left you alone with your hundred-plus recipe tree.
I've changed that.
The quest panel now works out your next actual move and tells you what you can do:
You already have it - hand it over.
You've made it before - buy it again in Buy Resources.
You can make it right now - here are the two ingredients to mix.
It's still a long way off - here's the first step you can take today, and what it builds toward.
No known path yet - keep experimenting.
Your inventory is full - that's why nothing is working.
The game searches the recipe tree from the requested ingredient downward and surfaces the nearest step you can actually perform with what you own or can buy.
The hints are fully translated into English, Russian, Ukrainian, Polish and Japanese.
[/QUEST HINTS]
Your save file is now much harder to lose
I've also made saving considerably safer.
Previously, the game could write directly to the save file during normal gameplay. If something interrupted that write at exactly the wrong moment - a crash, Windows deciding it had somewhere else to be, or a sudden power cut - the save could end up damaged.
I've changed the save system so that:
Saves are now written to a temporary file first and swapped in only after the write has fully completed.
The game keeps a backup of your previous save and can automatically fall back to it if the main file becomes unreadable.
If a save genuinely cannot be recovered, it is now set aside as a .corrupt file instead of being silently treated as a new game.
Saves are now batched instead of being written constantly, which also means noticeably less disk activity during long clicker sessions.
Your save should now be considerably less vulnerable to the ancient Windows ritual of something went wrong, therefore your save is gone.
Loading tips: two thirds of them were never shown
Thirty loading-screen tips were written and translated into all five languages.
Only ten of them were previously in rotation.
I've now put all thirty into the pool, so expect advice you've genuinely never seen before - including some fairly direct recipe nudges.
Fixes
Adjusted quest character rotation so all ten characters can be encountered fairly.
Adjusted character weighting to prioritise characters you haven't met yet.
Fixed five achievements being effectively unobtainable due to quest rotation.
Fixed the quest rotation repeatedly favouring the same characters and quests.
Fixed the quest dialogue panel keeping text in the previous language when changing language while it was open.
Added all 30 loading tips to the rotation.
Improved save safety with atomic writes and automatic backups.
Added recovery handling for unreadable save files.
Reduced unnecessary save frequency and disk activity.
Thank you to everyone who reported "I've played forever and still haven't seen X."
You weren't imagining things. The Gods of Randomness had simply been having a little too much fun.
I've given them some rules now.
Keep the reports coming.