Hello everyone. You may have noticed Steam updating Expeditions: Viking last week and wondered what we just pushed on you. Hopefully your confusion wasn't too great when you found it updating yet again today. After a summer break and a long test period, we've finally released version 1.0.6 of Expeditions: Viking - and then version 1.0.6.1, which is a hotfix to solve an issue with one of the new features. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Let's talk about the new things we've added in this version!

Custom portraits

In version 1.0.6, all portraits are now loaded from your Documents directory in the folder \My Games\Expeditions Viking\Custom Portraits. If you want to add your own portraits to the game, you must create 5 different versions of each portrait in specific sizes and place them in that directory. The first time you launch the game in 1.0.6, it will write all our portraits into that folder, and you can use those portraits to see how it needs to be set up.

New portraits must meet the following requirements:

• The files can be either .png or .jpg.
• Each portrait's filename must end with a keyword that reflects its size: Large, Medium, Small, Tiny, or Camping.
• Female portraits must contain the word "Female" anywhere in the filename. Otherwise the portrait will be treated as male (because patriarchy).
• Note that the Camping portraits contain a frame. You can just cut that out of an existing portrait with your image editing software of choice.
• You can overwrite an existing portrait by simply replacing its files with a set of identically named files in that folder.

If you overwrite an existing portrait, that portrait will be replaced with your new version in your game, without you having to start over in your playthrough. If you want to reset this portrait to the original later, you can simply delete the portrait files from the Custom Portraits folder, and it will be restored by the game next time you launch it.

All portraits included with Expeditions: Viking are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Public License. In simple terms, you are allowed to remix, tweak, and build upon our work non-commercially, but you must credit Logic Artists or Expeditions: Viking and you must license your new creations under identical terms (no making money off of our work, please!)

If you find that your Custom Portraits folder is empty, it's because something on your computer is denying write access to Expeditions: Viking. In 1.0.6 this was breaking the portraits entirely, which is what 1.0.6.1 was created to address. As per 1.0.6.1 the game will fall back to the internal portraits contained in the data files, but that still means you won't get any portraits written to your custom portraits folder. You can still add new portraits there which will then show up in the game, but if you want to see the original portraits you'll have to find a way to give the game write access to that folder - you can try disabling your firewall and antivirus or just checking your user permissions. If your user account simply doesn't have admin access, you may need to talk to your admin.

Custom localisation and random events

This update also introduces support for loading in custom localisation files and user-created random events. Because of the way the scripting system in Viking works, there is no way for us to let you add new characters with new conversations to the game, but the random events that trigger on the campaign maps and during travel are loaded in dynamically, and now you can add new events yourself or even overwrite existing events.

In other words, you can now write your own damn Aife romance events and stop bothering us about it! :D

Toolset

We have also released our toolset which includes some example files, all of our conversation work files, and the editor we used to set up all our conversations in the game. It comes with a PDF manual with thorough instructions for how to set up your own localisation files or add your own random events. To install the toolset, click on Library in Steam and select Tools from the drop-down. The entry you're looking for is "Expeditions: Viking Editor".

For the next update, we're working on implementing the Steam Workshop into the game to make it easier for our players to share custom events, localisations, and even portraits. Until then, you can still share your creations the old-fashioned way: by uploading them to mod sites or hosting them yourself. We recommend using ModDB or the Nexus.

Change log

Since this update has had a particularly long gestation period (for our standards), we've decided not to include a full change list this time around. Instead, we're bringing you just the highlights. If you wish to know about any particular bug that's been bothering you, which isn't mentioned here, feel free to ask in the comments on this thread.

New things

• The "ancient" Roman item set now has unique models
• Custom localisation support
• Custom random events support
• Custom portrait support
• 4 new beard styles, 4 new male hairstyles, and 7 new female hairstyles
• A UI scaling option for running the game in high resolutions on small monitors
• New animations for certain combat actions as well as for ambient characters
• Taunt now has voice-over

Tweaks and improvements

• Talon and Dust are now free actions
• Cure no longer removes Spotted, Illuminated, Exposed, Disarmed, or Condemned
• Made Taunt resistable with Mental Resistance
• The difficulty of Guarding your camp now scales with your group size: the larger your party, the better you must guard it
• Changed the skillpoint display to show the amount of points spent instead of the total
• Follower selection popup now uses alphabetic sorting instead of being based on injuries
• Fog of War now takes up way less space in savegames (will only affect new saves)
• Distract can no longer be used on an adjacent enemy, as originally intended
• The Focused status effect now increases Crit Chance by 10 points instead of 10%
• Trip wire traps can no longer be resisted
• When capturing an occupied campsite, the camera will now switch into the camping view once combat ends

Major fixes

• Fixed issue with pathfinding when reloading Homestead, causing players to get stuck in the terrain
• Fixed the AI sometimes switching to unarmed combat for no apparent reason
• Fixed a bunch of weird things with the Runaway bounty encounter
• The houses that are burning during the invasions of Perth or York will now remain burned-down after the battles
• Fixed the skill caps being circumventable during character creation by double-clicking on the icon instead of using the Upgrade button
• Made it possible to lie to Sandarr about taking Mani as a thrall exactly once and still come back to complete or fail the quest
• Fixed a quest logic bug in Pack It Up that was prematurely closing the quest if you left the forest after resolving Unwanted Guests and then came back later
• All characters' items will now be transferred to the item inventory in the unfortunate event of death
• Fixed a bug that would cause the game to get stuck when returning from the final dream if you triggered it in a specific camp site
• Fixed the issue where throwing the waterskin on an ally would select it instead
• Fixed another way it was possible to get stuck in the Unwanted Guests side quest by clicking on things in the wrong order multiple times in a row
• Made the intro conversation to the pig feud quest just play again if you interrupt it the first time and retrigger it later
• Fixed a bug whereby the start time for all time-based status effects except Hung Over was not being set, causing them to be immediately removed again
• Fixed an issue where allied combatants would sometimes not return to being NPCs
• Fixed characters being able to traverse blocked hexes in two encounters
• Fixed Torfinn not getting removed as a follower when you leave Skjern Forest before completing his quest, causing him to only spawn every 2nd time you enter the forest
• Fixed the Swipe ability not dealing damage to enemies around the target if the target was killed
• Fixed Cure and Restore abilities using reach distance when equipped with a spear
• Fixed the Escaped Thralls conversation in Perth being able to trigger during any of the battles despite the thralls not being around
• Fixed the combat character tooltips showing the selected character's crit chance in place of the hovered character's crit chance
• Fixed a few typos in dialogue
• Fixed an issue where some status effect icons would sometimes appear white in the camping interface
• Fixed the error message for having spent the necessary action in the utility item tooltips looking in the wrong localisation file

And many other minor things.

Plans for 1.0.7

In addition to the Steam Workshop support mentioned above, we're planning several new features for 1.0.7.

Iron Man mode is the big one. We would've liked to add that a lot earlier, but we were getting so many crash reports in previous versions of the game that we simply weren't comfortable adding a mode that only allows one savegame. Now that we've addressed all common sources of crashing, we're ready to activate Iron Man mode in the next update. The update will also include a few new tweaks to difficulty including a new slider to improve the equipment used by enemies. Our goal is to make the higher difficulties higher without messing with the lower difficulties.

We're also planning a slew of small quality-of-life tweaks. Probably the most commonly requested change is to give the player some control over the camera tilt, to which we have now acquiesced. We're also adding a combat speed slider and an option to toggle off the automatic camera focus during combat. Finally, we're adding a little more information to some parts of the interface where things were unclear or unexplained.

Please let us know on the forums if you're experiencing any problems with version 1.0.6.1, or if you have any particular requests for small tweaks or improvements you would like to see in 1.0.7. We don't have as much time for the next update as we did for 1.0.6, so don't expect any major changes or additions, but we're always happy to take your feedback regardless of how practical it is :)