The Minilog - Cooking Up A Storm

Hi everyone. It’s that time again~

New crafting

This update introduces several new crafting and edible items. You can view most of the new items and their recipes in the crafting station. As expected, this interface has undergone a few changes during the implementation process.

The crafting interface is now functional. We can now have multiple recipes per craftable item and perform bulk crafting. “Why multiple recipes per item?”, I hear you ask. A meal could be crafted with various types of veggies, or perhaps you can use one large egg instead of many small ones to bake that cake. This makes it easier to work with what you have at your disposal. On another note, for construction crafting, we will have special alternate recipes unique to the Automotive Hacksmith.

The idea of a “recipe discovery system” has been proposed. Such a system might come in the form of a "experimentation menu" where you pick random ingredients and see if it creates something. Once you create something, you learn its recipe. This would work well for both cooking food and brewing potions, as there have been further discussions surrounding failed potions, their devastating effects, and how they could potentially be weaponized as throwables. 

Another fun feature added to the crafting screen is the ability to select an ingredient to view its details. If a recipe calls for a chain of items to be crafted, you can click on the ingredient and then craft it. If you lack a particular item, reading into its description may also help you figure out where you can find it.

Finally, the crafting recipe menu features a functional search bar. I’ve been wondering, would you like to see a search bar in the inventory as well?

Before we move on, I should also mention a slight change to slime drops. Slimes now drop a “raw slime clump” item, which can be crafted into jelly. The raw clumps are still edible as they're waiting to become a TF (transformation) item.

Reversion Item

Upon creating a new character, your original body state will now be stashed for later use. This change has allowed for creation of the reversion potion and status effect. This potion triggers the “Reversion” status effect on the player, which causes any bodily changes to gradually return to their original state. Please note, using this potion on any character created before version 0.17.3-A will result in unexpected behavior.

For the next build I'll be adding a permanence potion which lets you update your stashed body state based on your current form, meaning any reversion potion consumed after that point would restore your body to the state it was in when you last consumed a permanence potion.

Other Potions & Obtaining Items

Pushing ahead with other developments, I’ve improved the game's internal item scripting framework by adding custom argument support. Put simply, this means a script can have far more reusability. For example, there may be multiple haste potions that use the same status effect but have different durations. It makes more sense to use one script for all of these, and then on each item set a custom data value to represent duration. Most importantly, none of this is hardcoded, so there’s less maintenance overhead, and if modding is in this game's future, modders will be able to take better advantage of existing scripts.

Taking advantage of the new capabilities, some lingering variants of the breast expansion potion with increased potency and duration have been added.

Obtaining ingredients for recipes and some of the newer potion items isn’t incredibly straightforward at the moment; however, most ingredients you’ll need can be found by looting chests in the dungeon. I would like to make some changes to the way loot spawns on shelves and in the shop in order to make adding items in these areas less of a manual process. This would provide you with more opportunity to find the items you need when crafting and, again, reduce maintenance overhead long-term.

Bottling Mechanic

I’ve added a bottle filling mechanic. Not much to say here. You can take an empty bottle and fill it with liquids you find lying around. Not all liquids may be bottleable at this time; however, I am working to fix that.

This little mechanic is initially intended to let you collect fluids (pools and spills), which may be used in potions, and later, I may use this to let the player milk that which can be milked.

Fixes & Other Clean-ups

• If you are interested in translating the game or are one of the few actively translating the game, support has now been added to the character creator archetype selection screen, and translation cycling issues have been fixed for some static buttons across menus.

• A small amount of variance has been added to player damage calculation.

• Several new shelf clutter variants have been added to reduce the level of sameness from shelves. As mentioned prior, shelf loot is later bound to undergo another change, which should allow it to automatically keep up with the growing loot table.

• Status effects now persist on UI when crossing load barriers, and resume after loading from save.

Upcoming & Other Yappenings

Taking a quick look ahead, now that we have all this food, I’d like to make some minor improvements to the consuming experience, e.g., preview HP addition and reduction an item may provide (namely for HP potions and poisons), and move food items away from passive MP / HP gain, as these are difficult to quantify, difficult to convey to the player, and instant feedback feels better. In an instance where an item needs to provide a passive effect, it’s likely better to portray this as a status effect. Finally, a basic starvation mechanic and food stat rebalance should come in an upcoming build.

Current feedback indicates more enemies are desired, and I would personally like to remove the jank present in existing enemies, so as we move into April, I will work on several more. They will exist in a blocky prototype state while I play with their mechanics and movements. They need to feel good before they look good, and I want you to play with them as soon as possible so I can make them better. Around all this, we should also see a basic defeat to the preg pipeline be put together, as I’d like to finally make use of all my fun body morphs... More enemies also means more sources of ingredients. Some of the items new to this version (e.g., Monster Meat) are intended to end up as enemy drops.

Also on the horizon, some updates to TLoH are expected. Complex condition building is now a priority alongside branching dialog support, which itself is a core component of the NPC dialog backend for Arkavite proper.

The public build will drop around next weekend, and I anticipate 0.18.0-A coming the week after that. Plenty in the works, and plenty on the way, but that’s all for now. I hope you all enjoy this update. Please be sure to let me know what you think! I’ll see you next time~