Greetings fellow gods,

This is the first of the bigger patches focusing on balancing and polishing Soulash before the upcoming 1.0 Steam release.  The major highlights of the patch are a new type of enemies hiding in the wheat fields - Crop Goblins, designed by our amazing Patron vitokin!

We've added a more traditional movement style in the options based on Numpad and directions in relation to the screen instead of a sight arrow marker for anyone who finds the current movement confusing.

Not long ago I've started playtesting the game much more, as I've decided to play through the game with every profession to get a feel for them and flesh them out a bit where they're lacking. We ran a poll on discord to pick the profession that could use the most attention right now, but unfortunately, the 3rd party tool we've used failed us this time. I've decided to pick the most and least popular profession based on recently implemented Steam Leaderboards (which I'll show off another time, as we get close to Steam release) - Necromancers and Poachers. My playthroughs are not finished, but as you'll read through patch notes I caught a lot of things that I felt the need to improve, and I'm happy to say both of these professions play much better, and may improve a bit still in the future patches.

Necromancers were the main focus this time around as I got the furthest so far. I've made some AI improvements for the summons, changed Corpse Explosion to work on summoned zombies and skeletons for mid to late game synergy, reworked Poison Cloud to be more useful, made some changes to Corruption - although I think this skill may still need a bit more work to compete with alternatives.

For Poachers, there were some improvements in the UX, like combining stacks of arrows on equipping, but also a very significant change in Sense Life ability, which changed the generic hearing marker into a proper entity glyph. That felt like a significant change in playstyle because Poachers can detect living beings in the range of 20 tiles very accurately and plan their engagements in a much safer way than before. At the same time, relying on this ability alone in certain areas may lead to a quick end, as it doesn't detect non-living beings, like the undead. Overall I've been pretty happy with how the profession plays, the playstyle is completely different than the Necromancer, more tactical, but Poachers don't feel weaker. I got to level 5 so far, so later skills may need a bit of tweaking still.

I'm also happy to say that support for up to 2560x1600 resolution should be now complete, I've been playing on it for some time. If you encounter some issues yourself, please let me know.

Full patch notes are below:

Added

- Crop goblins are lurking in the wheat fields.
- Added switch for "Directional" movement based on Numpad keys in Keymap settings, with automatic rotation before the move. Movement in a direction can be performed while holding the left ctrl key.
- Marked item tooltips with a known recipe to quickly indicate if the item is already learned.
- Added impassable edge regions around the world.
- 35 alternative region maps.
- Added 64x64 tile dimensions in settings.
- Right mouse click to remove the ability from the action bar.
- Added social icons on the main menu screen.
- Alternative images for stones and a pile of bones. 
- Animation for underground river, stone wall with a torch, and wandering soul.

Changed

- Corpse explosion now works on summoned zombies and skeletons.
- Poacher ability Sense Life now shows glyphs of the actual enemies discovered instead of generic hearing markers. Sense Life cast time is now 0.5 turns (from 0.0).
- Equipping a stackable item (for example, arrows) when there's already a stackable item equipped will combine the stacks instead of replacing it.
- It's now possible to rest in the equipment screen by pressing `r` as long as a repairable item is not selected.
- Rest until healed and sleep actions now provide a progressive bonus to health regeneration that equals 1 HP / 10 turns passed, until reaching a limit of 1/10th of endurance.
- Willpower now reduces fatigue twice as fast during sleep (-0.2 per turn per point from -0.1).
- Changed required mods in Continue game screen to display mod names with the author instead of folder names.
- Improved bleed, water wave, cripple animations.
- Alarm removed from level 2 ability selection.
- Vampire Bloodlust drops twice as fast.
- Corruption ability duration changed from 5 turns to 6, it's possible to corrupt target of higher level, damaging the controlled entity no longer breaks the effect, success is determined by contesting willpower test.
- Poison Cloud ability now deals nature damage immediately and poisons targets in the area. Few random tiles may be covered with the cloud, sometimes for 2 turns.
- Improvements in AI behavior during combat.
- Skeleton champion move speed increased to 1.1 turns per tile from 1.5.
- Skeletons, just like zombies, no longer have fatigue and will not require sleep.
- Zombies and skeleton champions have higher death and nature resistances but lower fire and holy.
- Poor citizens were removed from the village near the entrance to the city.
- Most guards in the city were replaced with militiaman.
- Tweaked enemy numbers across the Capital.
- Added more light sources in the Capital.
- Golden amulet is now craftable.
- Quicker Piercing shot animation.
- Changed weight of multiple items.
- Primitive bow durability bumped to 60 (from 40), Short bow to 80 (from 60).
- When learning a new ability on level up, it's placed on the action bar as long as there's an empty slot.
- Chairs and crates are no longer considered items.
- Animations of attacks and abilities performed outside the field of view will be visible.
- Fixed pickup of items produced by woodcutting or other production actions to pick up only the amount that can be carried.
- Changed action progress circle icons.

Fixed

- Fixed UI scaling above 1920x1080 in level up screen, death screen, cheat console, crafting progress bar, split stack box, artifact salvage confirmation box.
- Fixed font size in certain parts of the game on 1920x1080 resolution.
- Fixed main menu background sometimes having animation issues.
- Core gfx always loads after core.
- Fixed issue with part of world map not unloading correctly when starting a new game.
- Fixed fireball and firebolt animations.
- Minimap fills up with pixel tiles on 2560x1600 resolution.
- Fixed summoned zombies getting stuck while hugging each other.
- Whetstone gets destroyed after a single use.
- Fixed resolution select in settings overlapping label.
- Fixed color of maple log.
- Fixed blank tiles in one of the alternative maps of Western Yelling Mountains.
- Blocked creation of a mod without author or name.
- Fixed Holy Water to be equippable.
- Fixed click sounds in the exit menu when selecting options.
- Fixed the graphical issue of targeting borders when line targetting was selected immediately after looking at the tile tooltip.
- Dialogues won't trigger multiple times for NPC characters when hit too many times in a single turn.

Modding

- Added undo (ctrl + z) and redo (ctrl + y) actions in Map Maker for placed and removed tiles.
- Fixes in scaling UI in Entity Maker editor.
- Fixed memory leak in Map Editor causing crash after loading too many regions.
- On Enter component ability trigger now has new properties defining chance to trigger and restricting the on entering ability trigger to the player alone.
- Summon count effect now applies to the Construct effect to restrict the amount.

Before the end of the month, we plan to announce the 1.0 release date with a graphic tileset that will come to Itch and Steam, join us on Discord to stay in the loop.