Greetings fellow gods!

A long overdue patch is finally here, with a long list of goodies introduced to Soulash. It's been a weird year for many of us and I hope you all stay safe and healthy during this time. This year brought a lot of changes (positive too!) into my life, which negatively impacts the pace of Soulash development. Moving closer to the end of the year and looking forward into 2021, I will be announcing some changes to where the game is going and a couple major goals for the game before the game can become complete. Stay tuned!

Now let's discuss the major changes introduced in v0.5 patch named "Living World".

Production actions

Do you remember actions like woodcutting, mining, butchering, skinning, fishing and so on? All of them have been replaced with moddable production actions. These actions are available in characters.json and in the main game include Woodcutting, Butchering, Skinning, Mining, Fishing, Mining, Harvesting, Threshing, Repairing, Cooking, Gathering, Milking and Digging.

The introduction of a unifying mechanism for all of these actions allowed to fix all of the limitations of the previous system, for example, all of these actions may require an item or not, all of them can produce multiple items from the action. The system is very flexible for modding, it allows to create any named action that will spawn an entity after completion and may require any item to start the action. It could work for closed doors that are replaced with open doors with specific item. It's also not limited to just producing items. Find a beehive in the game, gather some honey and see what happens!

Oh and yes, you read it correctly - repairing is added to the game! There is a temporary item that can repair something with a single use and a static tool found in different places around the world that can repair your items any number of times. However, there is a catch. Any repair will drop the max durability by 10. Your items will not be infinitely usable, but you will be able to keep using the best of your finds longer.

AI improvements

There are many new actions the AI actors can perform in the game. Playing before you probably noticed most of them just wander around aimlessly. With changes in v0.5, your enemies will try to lead their own lives until they meet their doom. They will use production actions mentioned previously to create resources, they can craft items, they will look for cover under a roof when it's raining and they will try to find a bed when tired.

Another important improvement is that AI finally thinks in 3 dimensions. This includes your army of the dead, necromancers, they will follow you through the stairs. No longer you have to leave your best buddies behind as you venture toward the world's end.

Artifacts

Artifacts are the 4th rarity tier introduced to Soulash in patch v0.5. Any item can spawn as an artifact during the world creation. These special items get the base item stats and apply additional bonuses, described in the affixes.json file where all other prefixes and suffixes can be found.

But it's not just stat improvements like in the other 3 tiers of rare items. Artifacts provide the ability to use abilities in a limited number of uses. And AI actors can use them as well! Get ready for farmers with randomly spawned Armaggedon! It can get rough from time to time, but the prize will be worth it.

This patch introduces 24 of such artifacts into the core game.

Single-use items

So far we had only bandages to help us win battles, but a lot more tools are now available. Latest patch introduces multiple potions and spell scrolls that are stackable and offer single-use abilities. Just having them in your equipment will enable the ability in your skill book with the counter indicating how many uses are available.

Enemy rebalance

Enemies of level 1 - 4 should now be easier to deal with, while enemies of level 6 - 13 will be tougher. The game was too easy at times after getting to higher levels, hopefully this will make it a bit more challenging. I will continue to evaluate and continue working on balance over the next patches, so feel free to share your experience on discord or itch community boards.

At the same time, I've received a lot of feedback that first level is one of the most difficult for many players. I hope it will be easier to learn the game after these changes.

Randomized loot

AI actors produce resources and stash them in predefined locations on the map. An important improvement to the game world generation is that these stashes spawn with randomized loot for all of the enemy groups in the world. Apart from just items, Soulash v0.5 introduced a new type of usable items - recipes. To encourage exploration, any map where group of enemies spawn, may contain a random recipe that immediately teaches the ability to craft a certain item. The more difficult the group, the better the items that can be crafted.

Full change log

The list of changes is longer than ever, so for those of you who would like to get a more in-depth description of what changes in the game and in modding tools, the full change log is available below and as a file in your game directory.

### Added
- New AI behaviors: 
    - run away if no allies nearby.
    - gather valuable items in stash locations.
    - don't wander off spawn region.
    - hide from weather under a roof.
    - production actions: harvesting, threshing, milling, crafting, repairing, cooking, gathering, milking, digging, woodcutting, mining, butchering, skinning, fishing.
- New Tag behavior: cover from weather under roof if available.
- New container type "Stash" added to all existing regions, marking a spot where AI groups can gather their bounty.
- Random crafting recipes and loot spawn on "Stash" locations during world generation.
- New action Harvest, allowing to cut down wheat with scythe.
- New action Milk, allowing to get milk from cows and goats.
- New action Gather, allowing to gather resources from special entities.
- Dragging items with liquid source leaves a trail of that liquid if available.
- Added message indicating picking up items.
- Added tile transition between background tiles to make it less edgy.
- AI actors learned to use abilities granted by items.
- Added support for mouse wheel on save game screen, cemetary and mod screen.
- Drag & drop support in equipment screen.
- Crafting screen extended to support crafting multiple items of the same type one after another.
- 24 artifact rarity items that give temporary access to abilities. Abilities on items with durability will reduce it on use. Durability lost is equal to half of the ability level. 
- 6 new enemies.
- 9 new alternative maps.
- 2 new alternative starting positions.
- 69 new items.
- 16 new abilities, including Cultist abilities up to level 13.

### Changed
- Improved gameplay performance.
- Massive game rebalance accross the board, reduced power of enemies at level 1 - 4, excluding minibosses and increased statistics of enemies at level 6 - 13.
- Added information about the stack count of items laying on a tile.
- Increased backpack size to 50 slots to accomodate extended versatility of available items.
- Enhanced some of the existing maps.
- Actors without moveable component (immobile AI actors) can now exist in the world.
- Actors without stamina or health can now cast spells without paying the cost.
- AI no longer notices player on different z-level.
- Changed the way Usable component works. Instead of allowing the use of usable items by action "use item", items now add the attached ability to the skill book as a temporary ability that consumes the item on use or reduce it's durability by the ability level on cast. Usable items that can be equipped, has to be equipped before the ability is granted, but items that are not equippable like bandages or scrolls grant the ability by being placed in the backpack.
- Increased chances to spawn items with affixes.
- Added durability to all pieces of jewelry.
- Corpse explosion damage increase by 20% weapon damage.
- Added sources of light to Forgotten Temple starting area.
- Tooltips now display for entities on a lower z-level with message on tooltip indicating position difference.
- Added a generic system for actions that create new entities, and applied it to woodcutting, mining, fishing, butchering and skinning actions. This change allows adding new production actions through mods.
- Entity rotation is now based on Sight component instead of Moveable component, allowing for stationary entities with a rotating vision.

### Fixed
- AI actors fight unarmed when out of arrows.
- Fixed error causing cutting wood to progress time at double speed.
- Fixed crash when looking at enemy that tries to pickup arrows.
- Cats no longer weight as much as cows.
- Added missing stat bonuses on Fabulous prefixes.
- Fixed AI rotation bug that sometimes caused full circle rotation.
- Race tooltips fitting the screen in low resolution.
- Fixed targeting border color when hovering over appropriate target when using open, drag, butcher or skin actions.
- Fixed roof on one of the Mensfield alternative maps.
- Fixed entities prefering to sleep in bed when available.
- Picking up stack of items now display the count in message log.
- Iron vein didn't produce iron ore when mining.
- Fixed input lock when selecting ability on cooldown.
- Fixed combat music sometimes didn't stop playing.

#######

## Mods

#######

### Added
- Concept of behaviors that can be assigned to entities in Artificial Intelligence component.
- Added 360 degree vision as an editable property of Sight component.
- Summon and construct effect display entity select in animation editor.
- Added logging information in the "logs/errors.log" file for outcome of mods loaded.
- Added support to edit existing maps from required mods in custom mods. Previously the existing maps didn't load, only the maps around the one being created.
- Random resource component respawn rate now works during playthrough, allowing respawning entities in the world.
- Mod setting - disable 3d, that will disable all 3d effects.
- Mod setting - draw all glyphs, that will draw all entity glyph on a tile instead of just the top one.
- Usable component now supports learning new recipes.
- It's now possible to add new production actions in character.json files for mods. Production actions can be any action that allow interacting with entities that have Producer component and produce any entity in result. An example could be a cut wood action that requires woodcutting tool and may replace tree with tree trunk. Another option could be to kick an altar and summon an angry god. Lot's of options.
- Added the ability to move between region maps in Map Maker by holding control key (left or right) and pressing arrow keys or numpad keys. Moving up down can be done with +/- or page up/down with control key held.
- Added support for moving current map in Map Maker with numpad keys.
- New ability effects: Silence, Restore energy.

### Changed
- Renamed ability effect "cage" to "construct", as it can construct any entity for a set duration.
- It's now possible to change only a small part of assets.json when overwriting core mod. For example it's possible to replace only ASCII glyph tilesheet without editing other parts like sounds or music.
- Removed item type cost in ability editor "Any" as it was redundant - works the same as no value at all.
- Disabled automatic map saving until there has been any changes done to the map.
- Changing a map in a mod set as overwrite will no longer disable all existing maps of required mods, they can still be overwritten manually by removing all tiles and saving.
- Changed Random Resource component respawn timer to allow values up to 10000 turns from previous 100.
- Replaced Woodcutter, Fisher, Miner, Cutter, Anvil, Smelter, Workbench, Tailor tool, Tailor workplace components with Tool component. It's now possible to add new tool types by simply adding them to the list of messages.json file.
- Replaced Woodcutting, Mineable, Butcherable, Skinnable, and fishes from Water component with a generic Producer component. Some of the mentioned components could only produce a single type of entity, but Producer allows creation of multiple entities at once and assigning percent chance to drop to all of the custom production actions.

### Fixed
- Fixed mod loading order.
- Fixed multiple crashes related to mods.
- Dynamically assigned ids for entities now work with character entities, allowing to add new recipes and items into professions and races without crashes.
- When editing existing mod and saving, the selected mod changed to the last one on the list.
- Fixed entity maker scroll positions after multiple entry.
- Fixed entity maker loading entities data being edited.
- Selecting options on multiselect sometimes caused invalid options to be selected permanently.
- Fixed not saving design maps when only pasting or cutting tiles.
- Fixed crash on adding a random resource when there are multiple entities with the same name.
- Fixed multiselect options slider to reduce in size after filtering.
- Fixed particle slider in animation editor.

To finish up this announcement, I would like to thank you all for your amazing support over the last 2 years. Your interest and excitement around Soulash pushed me in times where I thought it's too difficult to continue, with a family and a full time job. I wish you many hours of fun experience in this and future versions of the game. Please share this post with your friends that might be interested, and have a try at modding using the in-game editors!

Have fun!