Greetings fellow gods,

This week, we have another delivery of smaller feature requests from you, dear players - petting animals, digging underground, and deconstructing floors were probably the most anticipated, but I think some of you will find a few more gems in the changelog below:

Added

- You can pet your animals.
- Placing stairs going down will generate levels to a maximum of -5 below ground.
- Added option to demolish floor tiles on the left building menu.
- Spice Seekers added to allowed buildings for player settlements.
- Barley flour and bread are available in player settlements.
- You can now pour water on blood tiles to remove them.

Changed

- Slightly increased experience rate for NPC characters.
- Bushes regrow their berries after some time.
- Mushroom Farms require gatherable mushrooms for building rather than items.
- Set max crafting count for stackable items to 100 for player crafting.
- Reduced Wheat Flour crafting time by half.
- Improved companion pathing when chasing commanded targets.
- Maul recipe moved to level 39 of Weaponsmithing.
- Branches can be gathered in the forest to be used as firewood.
- Dwarven Beer looks better and tastes the same.
- Tweaked stats for some military companions.
- Hunters in player towns hunt for Leopards.
- Cypress the Black Thunder got a buff.
- High Grass is destructible.

Fixed

- Building using materials from the stash in player-controlled settlements is free on subsequent characters.
- Disabled most equipment slots for Cats, Dogs, and Pigs.
- Fixed portraits of animals in Night Circus.
- Fixed stairs generation at Mushmen settlements.
- In-progress entities don't grow.
- Companions listen when ordered to take the stairs.
- Dropped stack of baby animals spawn one by one.
- Splitting stack in companion equipment no longer moves part of the stack to player equipment.
- Apply to Party and Stamina amplifier combo no longer reduces the stamina gained in some cases.
- Max Orc Goat Farm set to 2.
- Fixed missing Sheep Ranch in player settlements when wool is available in the region.
- Resting and ability selection while building correctly drops the full vision.
- Swap weapons message correctly points to the companion rather than the player character.
- Sun Amulet, Cat Eye Ring, and Mastery Ring get armor-related bonuses from resources.
- Fixed NPC max potential going above what's available.
- Night Circus is brought to order.
- Blood baths contain blood.
- Changed the default non-rotate key to Keypad 0 for directional movement style and fixed the rotation lock.

Hotfix v0.8.3.1

- Fixed crash related to crafting stackable items.

The Summer Sale is over, and things went wild for Soulash 2 recently, with thousands of new players joining the game and Discord since the v0.8 update. Every weekend for the last 4 weeks, we've broken the record of concurrent players, which is pretty wild. Thank you all for being a part of this awesome journey with us, and while I don't want to say too much too soon, there's a real chance now to be able to go beyond the planned scope. The plans don't change yet, however, and we're still going to get married, raise a son, and go to war in the next few months ahead.

I'm starting to feel burnout creeping in lately due to such an intense month of June, so I'll try to slow down a little in July to recharge and plan a short vacation in August. Before hopping on the family-related features, we'll add a new magic-based ability to the game - hopefully next week!

I'm very happy with how things are progressing. It warms my heart to see so many of you enjoying the game so much. In seven months since release, we've surpassed the first Soulash sales of the same timeframe, reaching 19,000 copies on Steam today, which is pretty wild. And there's still so much ahead for us!

I'll see you all on Discord and in next week's update, and please make sure to pet your trusty werewolf companions,

Artur