We had another busy month here, posting almost daily (sometimes more than once daily) patches with new content and bug fixes. Mostly we added a lot of new content, fleshing out the mid-game with tons of new equipment, enemies, and battle maps.
Some of you may have noticed that the battles have gotten a lot tougher. Enemies outside the starting area now have bigger armies, more levels, and better equipment. Keep a close eye on the difficulty meter before you go into battles and be cautious before venturing into any caves or dungeons.
To prepare for the upcoming battles, you should check out the equipment vendors in all the towns you visit. Most types of weapons and armor now have five tiers. (And some may have six or seven before we're done.) Only a few of the dozens of new items are shown here.
We altered the vendors' inventories to give you access to better equipment sooner. As a side-effect of adding all this new equipment, your monster classes (which don't use weapons or armor) will be underpowered. We're working to fix that. Crafting will also be less useful for a little while until we can add more recipes to keep crafted weapons a step above off-the-shelf weapons.
We added several new battle maps this month to add some more variety to the battles. You can find this ruined hilltop town in the Shadowlands.
There's also a new desert map, the lava map you saw at the top of this post, and a new grassland map.
And we did all of this in addition to fixing more bugs than we can count.
We think the game has been fleshed out enough for us to start adding more story elements again. In August we'll try to script more encounters to move the plot along.
Thank you everyone for your continuing interest in Himeko Sutori! We hope to have more updates for you soon.