Greetings again Dredgers!
Some of these changes already rolled out yesterday, some will have rolled out by the time this has been posted!

Unfortunately the green EXP changes did not go down well, as it seems my play tests didn't quite give me correct info (since I habitually play human, I was getting more blue EXP). Also coupled with people's concerns about it introducing heavy RNG to levelling, I decided to revert the blue EXP change. However, you'll now need more blue and green EXP to level up. As compensation, you now get 2 skill points per level (Gloomp gets 3) so you should still be able to go through classes at the same speed as before!

Something I didn't have time for last patch, but Archery critical rolls now scale of INT instead of DEX. This make crits something you actually spec into, rather than a weird barely interacted with source of damage. As a result, face guard and spectacles were changed, along with headshot and perfect aim.

Critical hits in general now also work on the base damage of the weapon rather than a flat amount.
Having 10 DEX and 10 INT, gives you a 50% chance for +200% weapon damage (20)
Having 10 DEX and 20 INT gives you two 50% chances for +200% weapon damage each (20 x 2)
Having 20 DEX and 10 INT gives you a 25% chance for +200% weapon damage (40)
This is the same for melee attacks, just using DEX instead of INT.

You can now swing weapons up to 4x faster, assuming you have enough STR or DEX. For melee weapons, you need 3x STR in DEX for max swing speed. For bows you need 3x (DEX+INT) in STR for max shoot speed (due to INT being part of crit now).

Crafting has been changed to DEX+INT instead of DEX&INT. So you won't need to dip into both stats if you don't want to. Hunger cost and the ability to give prefixes was removed from Food, Herbalist items and Keys. Hunger cost base is now 5 per material, capped at 50 (still gets reduced by STR+SPD+ENG).

As per usual, changelog is just a compilation of my #dev_logs on the discord, so it will not contain every single change unfortunately, but most of the major ones at least:

• Visic enemies now wear clothes so you can tell what class they are.
  
• Blue EXP now sticks around on the floor if you don't have space for it.
  
• You can sell items by shift left clicking in the store.
  
• Peddler no longer sells bad prefix items, and eventually sells much better items after many floors.
  
• Items now display the value you can sell them for. If you're inspecting an item in the shop, it'll show the base value of the item instead so you can tell how much of a discount you're getting.
  
• DEF no longer negates melee crits. (was meant to be removed ages ago when it was removed from range)
  
• Arrow coatings are rubbed off when piercing an enemy, however flames will persist.
  
• Perfect Aim now doubles your amount of crit rolls, instead of your crit chance.
  
• Headshot 3rd Rank: "Each projectile critical roll has it's chance doubled. For 50% rolls, this guarantees they crit."
  
• Furniture has half the health it had before to compensate for lower levels.
  
• Scavenge now works like butcher so it always guarantees furniture you destroy drops items, and puts them directly in your inventory.
  
• Quooz merchants can no longer sell masterwork quoozmade items, it will always be one or the other.
  
• Merchants can no longer be spoken to through walls.
  
• Peddler doesn't spawn if you're playing Gloomp or Gardule.
  
• You now get default starting equipment instead of 2 gems if you're playing Gloomp or Gardule.
  
• Undead who run out of energy now reward EXP.
  
• Splinter arrows now seek and retain fire if the original arrow had it.
  
• Sandin nerfed to 4 stats per level, since with 5 it was really easy for them to hit the 20 CON threshold. It might still be too easy but we'll see.
  
• Items of binding can now be removed from dead corpses.
  
• Items can no longer be identified by putting them on dead corpses. (Putting them on allies to identify still works fine)
  
• First enemy of floor 1 is now always a slime, and the rest of the enemies on floor 1 aren't. (Unless a Slimegirl spawns)
  
• Rapiers are now 25% STR and DEX, to account for attack speed changes.
  
• Knives attack half as slowly, to account for attack speed changes. As compensation they now get double crit damage.
  
• Enemy vision radius has been shortened to what it used to be.
  
• Wands now have 50% STR scaling.
  
• Wooden weapons now have to hit torches 10 times before become aflame. This is to prevent enemies from instantly getting lit weapons on early floors.

That should be it for the moment, sorry for the issues caused by the previous update!
Hopefully next time you hear from me, I'll have a new boss battle for you to tackle :D

Greetings Dredgers!
We came off holiday 2 days ago and really got stuck in with development, so here's a patch already!
"Rob aren't you supposed to be working on other things?" No I'm a free man I can do what I want.
With the long form streams coming in from Chinese and English streamers after the update, and some play testing of my own, I decided I really wanted to do a balance patch. If you've played at all last patch you'll know green EXP was totally out of whack. Similarly if you've played for any length of time, you'll know levels are kinda whack too! And likewise, crafting is rather... lackluster, even Quooz in the end game get outshined by their brothers.


Crafting now costs 50 Hunger by default. This can be reduced directly by having STR, ENG or SPD.
You can still technically craft without hunger, but you'll get a Flawed item.

Here is the VERY temporary prefix menu. It doesn't look great since, this is a short stopgap I've created in about half a day. I have much greater plans for crafting, but those will take months to complete.
Firstly, each prefix has a requirement, that being DEX and INT. So adding Masterwork requires that you have 100 DEX and 100 INT, if you want Strong as well, you'll need 125 DEX and INT.
Secondly, the hunger requirement is raised by the amount of INT/DEX required.
Thirdly, each prefix raises the cost of crafting by xTimes. So a Masterwork weapon requires x5 the amount of resources to make. A Masterwork Strong weapon requires x10.

I'm hoping these changes do two things, primarily allow crafting to be competitive with ground loot, but also secondarily giving players a use for their hundreds of materials they gather.

Naturally Quooz have received a slight change, they now by default make excellent weapons.

Quooz get the option to make Masterworks and Quoozmade instead.

Everyone's favourite word!
If you've played Dredgers before and made it past floor 1, you might know enemies get quickly out leveled by players. Players regularly end floor 1 at level 3-4, and regularly end floor 2 at level 6-8. And for reference, enemy levels generally match the current floor. This generally means the player has an incredibly easy time through the entire game until something finally catches you and decides your continued existence is a crime.

So, green exp from killing higher level enemies has been changed to killing enemies with double your level or higher. You also don't get green exp this way unless you actually need green exp. These changes are mostly due to the fact that, in the last version, if you simply breathed you started drowning in green exp.

And now for the big and quite game-warping change, if an enemy drops green exp, they will not drop blue exp. This drastically reduces the player level throughout the whole game. On average the player will still be at the same or higher level than enemies to start. But once late game comes the player should start falling behind as the floors surpass the players level. Falling off has been intended and in the game since the beginning, but due to how the game worked, this only started happening at around floor 100-200.

These Exp changes make the game actually difficult now which, while harsh for newer players, should be welcome for those of us who can almost play with our eyes half-closed and both hands amputated because of that blasted peddler.

Previously prefixes on items gave over the top increases, Masterwork gave 2x damage and 2x attack speed, which meant if you got a masterwork item, your damage simply went up to 400%.
Quality prefixes such as 'Masterwork' 'Excellent' 'Poor' "Shoddy' now all only affect damage instead of attack speed, the damage multiplier has also been lowered.
Integrity prefixes such as 'Durable' 'Strong' 'Weak' 'Brittle' now affect attack speed as well. The amount of attack speed you gain or lose from these has also been lowered in comparison to the attack speed Quality prefixes used to give.
Quoozmade prefix remains unchanged for now.

Quooz merchants now sell things more randomly, and also sells crafting materials for affordable prices. Shocking, I know.
Their locations have also shifted and become a bit rarer, however they might sometimes be found in strange places.


Shortforms of prefixes can now be seen in shops and item tooltips.

As per usual, changelog is just a compilation of my #dev_logs on the discord, so it will not contain every single change unfortunately, but most of the major ones at least:

• Swapping to CN automatically turns on Mingliu font now.
  
• Dwarf has been lowered to 4 stats per level, as most races that get double benefit should have 3.
  
• Blood Lords now keep the bloodweaver learning that Blood Fallen have.
  
• Potions and Concentrates now automatically identify their counterparts.
  
• Smite now comes from God, so it counts as internal damage and doesn't apply player passives.
  
• Smite now hits 7 times, deals 50% CHM damage, and has a slightly longer cooldown.
  
• Fixed wands not regenerating energy if you were out of food, despite having wand expertise 2.
  
• Vile Knife no longer stacks on furniture.
  
• Blood Lords who use resurrection return to their previous race.
  
• You get EXP for hostile corpses you raise.
  
• Scroll of Imbue: Corpse no longer self imbues you.
  
• Modifier keys like alt+ctrl+shift will no longer unpause the game.
  
• Dwarves can sometimes spawn as necros.
  
• Bright objects like lava now are lit up in the darkness again.
  
• Health potions now scale on CON.
  
• Casting Tunic can now be crafted.
  
• Lasers in the labs now hit multiple times and deal damage based on the floor
  
• Domples no longer spawn on floor 2, due to the decreased levels making them quite easily able to oneshot.

Thanks for reading all the way through! Currently my plans are to add a boss battle before working some more on my next game before the update thereafter. There's even some clues hidden in this update as to it's race and class :D
Catch you all on the other side!

Greetings Dredgers! I'm just as suprised as you are that there's a patch so soon, let alone the contents of this patch. If you've been following news for a while, you may know Saves and Translations have been the two largest requested features of the game. They were also huge undertakings I really didn't have much time for.

However due to some strange circumstances, I was able to greatly reduce the work required needed to translate, probably at the cost of shaving a few years off my life. Likewise, I realised the game would need very little tweaking to actually work with gamemaker's save functionality, which is normally limited to simple games. I was very wrong and it was quite a hassle getting saving working, but still a lot easier than coding it from scratch! I still will likely be rewriting saving in the far future, so that visiting previous floors will be possible, but that's for another day.


I've been working with some translators to release a chinese translation as well this patch.

Your game will now save automatically every floor and when you quit the game. This allows you to continue runs in the event of a crash, power outage, or simply needing to leave your computer. Due to this system being an automatic feature of gamemaker, I'm not entirely in control of how it works, so just to be cautious, I would not rely on this unless you absolutely have to.
When you relaunch dredgers, you'll get an option to either continue playing or delete your old save and start a new game.
Save games are not compatible between versions. Even small patches might break them. If this happens, sorry in advance.

Almost all the game's text can now be translated! The main exceptions are a few places where the text is baked into the sprites, and difficult to recreate the effect with dynamic text. This is particularly noticeable in the main menu, along with most 'confirm' and 'cancel' buttons.
As a short tutorial, if you'd like to translate the game to your language:
Go into the language section of the options menu.
Export Language File
Go to 'C:\Users\<User name here>\AppData\Local\Dredgers\Languages'
Copy the EN_GB folder and rename it to your language's name.
Then you can start editing the files inside it!

Due to the overwhelming request from Chinese players, a Chinese/CN translation was added, with the help of three fans. 谢谢！

As per usual, changelog is just a compilation of my #dev_logs on the discord, so it will not contain every single change unfortunately, but most of the major ones at least:

• Basically nothing.
  
• No really, there's been almost no changes outside of the two major features.
  
• Practically no bug fixes either.
  
• Announcements on the side of the screen are now colour coded by importance.
  
• Buff System has been entirely rewritten internally, but this changes basically nothing.
  
• Bogrisen, Trunkit and Tenders can no longer self extinguish fire, you'll need water or to splash a potion. I don't remember why I made this change but have fun suffering.
  
• Trunkits no longer activate rosy outcome when hurt by fire or internal damage.
  
• 'Heard Incantation' buff from the scribe's copy skill no longer floods the screen with buffs.
  
• Fencer's SPD boost is now LVL+DEX instead of a flat 10.
  
• Added a secret race specific class, shh.
  
• A new rare chest type can now spawn in the place of unlocked golden chests. Now and in the future, items from it will generally be a reference to my friends, and things I like. They'll also be added for anyone who significantly contributed to the game. Subject to time and my discretion. Items from these chests are not lore accurate in any way. These rare items can always be sold for 5 green gems.
  
• Mana potions are slightly more useful now, and a bit less deadly: They'll consume 1 stack to restore 10% energy, but pause when your energy is capped out at 100%. Stacks will also disappear, 1 per 10 seconds.
  
• Iron Skin buff now halves damage taken externally along with boosting DEF.
  
• Summon circles now automatically summon after 2 seconds, so you don't need to recast. This allows you to practically spam summoning circles.
  
• Wisps have been nerfed. This is due to them being entirely 'free' so you can amass a huge amount of them, making them quite powerful.

And that's about it. Thankfully this should be the last time I need to mention saving and translations in an update post for a long time! As for future plans? I'm hoping to have a 3 week holiday for Christmas and new years, after that? Still plan to work on my next game for the near future. However, depending how popular the update/Chinese translation is, I may spend some time each week developing dredgers because I'm addicted to making it. If you need a more detailed idea, refer to the Version 45 update post.

Hope you all enjoy your holidays, thanks for reading all the way through and supporting me!

Greetings Dredgers! I swear I haven't abandoned you! I apologise for the long wait for an update, a lot of personal stuff has been happening in my life which lead to a rocky few months, and by the time I got back to dredgers I had a mountain of work and bug fixing to do.

During these few months I started work on another game to sell on steam, since I need to make sure I can keep working on games. Do not worry, I don't plan to stop developing Dredgers forever in favour of another game. To this end, I've hired my sister, Nonnen (the one who has been making all the update art), to help create art and sprites fulltime. This should massively speed up the creation of assets for my games.

So my current plan is as follows: After the release of today's update, and the bugfixing that occurs afterwards, we'll be swapping over to a smaller game to finish. If you've been in the discord or on the forums, you might know that my plan was to recreate my first game, Roses and Gems. I've decided to create something more small-scale for now instead of R&G remake, since R&G is looking like it will take many months to complete. After the small game is done, there'll mostly likely be one or more Dredgers updates before jumping back to R&G. Throughout the development of these other games, I hope to occasionally do Dredgers updates, even if they're small content ones.

Sorry for the delay with this update, and thank you for your patience! I really hope to turn Dredgers into one of the best rogue-likes available, so I hope you stay around for it, even if it takes months or years :)

And with all that out of the way, here is the changelog. The changelog is mostly filled with small features and changes rather than one big exciting one, due to the nature of how this update was created.


Enemies are now able to spawn in parties of four! They'll be hostile to everything else, just like a real RPG party!


The main reason for this update was to create a new crafting menu. This will more or less serve as the basis for the other future crafting updates. Crafting prices have also finally been restored to proper values, so everything no longer costs 1 of a material.

Dismantle and crafting are now available to everyone at level 1, however only basic items are craftable without craftsman.
Rank 0 dismantle gives a random item when dismantling. (this is the default if you don't have crafter)
Rank 1 dismantle lets you choose which item to get while dismantling.
Rank 2 dismantle lets you get all items when dismantling.

You can also now right click an item to find out what it is before crafting it, which leads onto the next change:


The item tooltip boxes have now been removed and replaced with 'infoboxes'. Infoboxes generically work for a lot of stuff, but are primarily used for items. 'Advanced Stats' has also been removed in favour of combining simple and advanced stats into one, so you have all the information and can see how it correlates to eachother. Since I added hyperlink support as well, you can also click to see what the base stats of the item are in a new box! One of the nicest parts of this update is that this is a window system, so you can drag the boxes around and position them where you like.

Enemies now obey stat rules, this generally leaves them with lower stats than before. As a balance change, the amount of green EXP required goes up 3 levels earlier, putting the player about 2 levels behind at the start of the game (this isn't as harsh as it sounds, players are regularly 5ish levels up on enemies at the start of the game). Likewise, blue exp requirement is now equal to the current level, this is to make it actually relevant in later parts of the game. This change also makes picking to go sewers on floor 3 quite an important choice, as the rat swarms there give lots of blue exp if you're behind on it.

Armour has also been increased by 5x the normal amount. This in combination with stat adjustments is to increase enemy resistance against burst, while lowering their damage to allow for non-archer dps and tank builds to be more viable. This also makes putting some points in DEF worth it as any class since it's as effective as health now if you have decent armour.


This is something I've wanted to redo for a while. The way stats/attributes was calculated was always pretty rigid and made it so certain things just were incompatible with eachother. So now things are calculated much more indepth, allowing stats to be stacked a bit further. There are also now infoboxes for attributes, which try to give a far better break down of how attributes are calculated.

Another important change is that 5 stat points per level is now the baseline for races instead of 3. This was an experimental change that actually turned out very nicely, so I've decided to keep it. Semi-related is that enemies now actually obey stat point rules, meaning they should have 'normal' stats for their level.


The character tooltip has now been replaced with an info box. It gives roughly the same information as before, but now also shows you their equipment (which can be inspected!) and if they will drop green exp. You are also able to view ally infoboxes and swap out their equipment if you want. Similarly the same can be done to enemy corpses, however when a character dies, their equipment is degraded, so it's often not that useful.

Enemies that are above your level will now have a skull to indicate so.


Leaderboards will be reset this patch. Leaders boards now measure down to milliseconds rather than seconds. They also now save data so you can see which race/class someone used to complete the game. (also their ending race/corpse status)


Each biome now has minable walls, with varying rarity. This should hopefully remove the bad feeling that comes with taking blacksmith outside of the dungeon.


Wands have been reworked to store energy rather than adjust incantation cost/power. This generally helps the idea that scholars want INT over ENG, which is a view point I've shifted to as it makes the most sense. Currently wands will store energy based on INT and ENG, but this quite likely will change somehow in the future. Swinging wands also no longer consumes your own energy but rather consumes the energy inside the wand itself.


Shoes and charms have been reworked so they now increase your stats by a multiplier instead of a flat value. This also allows them to be affected by prefixes, so they don't feel as useless!
Hats have also been changed so that most of them scale off level, allowing them to be modified by prefixes as well.

As per usual, changelog is just a compilation of my #dev_logs on the discord, so it will not contain every single change unfortunately, but most of the major ones at least:

• Torches now apply fire stacks equal to level instead of 5 stacks flat.
  
• VSync option added.
  
• Enemies now push each other around.
  
• Push radius decreased.
  
• Critters no longer push things once dead.
  
• Enemy AI tweaked so they follow better. This particularly effects melee.
  
• Melee enemies aim better and back off if too close.
  
• Parties and Necromancers now occasionally spawn as a challenge.
  
• Thief type enemies have been split between beggars and thieves. Beggars have poor equipment, thieves have knives/fencing.
  
• Sharp no longer increases all scaling, but rather increases STR, DEX and CON scaling, while lowering DEF scaling.
  
• Reinforced prefix now allows the item to act as a shield.
  
• Gloomp now gets 2 skill points on the level they don't get stat points.
  
• Bows now properly consume energy if they have an energy scaling.
  
• Wand Expertise Rank 1: Wands now take energy from the air, storing energy faster and no longer need food to recharge.
  
• Wand Expertise Rank 2: Allows charms, melee and ranged weapons that do not have an INT or ENG scaling to be charged with energy.
  
• You can now pay the shopkeeper 1 bronze coin to remove your trash.
  
• Items crafted by players are now considered trash by the shop keeper. To get rid of the 'collect all materials, craft them into items, and sell them' gameplay that was unfun but optimal.
  
• A quooz merchant will now spawn in a specific room in the melt, selling quooz-made items at obscene prices.
  
• Hats have been changed to function off level, but mostly work the same as before.
  
• Blood mask now heals on kill.
  
• Slimes now dash when close, and shoot slime balls when far, the opposite of what they did before.
  
• There 2 new curses and 3 new enchantments.
  
• Gold key cost has been reduced.
  
• Electricity damage has been changed. It still pierces armour, but can only be increase to a maximum of double the initial damage. This is due to enemies now being able to use it, which could oneshot armoured players.
  
• Corpses no longer block arrows.
  
• Arrows can now only crit on the first target hit, so piercing doesn't crit constantly.
  
• Allies now level up when you do, instead of at the end of floors.
  
• Scholar and caster enemies now resort to punching if they can't cast or are too stupid to.
  
• If you try to descend with an enemy around, it will aggro them and make descending exceptionally slow until they are defeated.
  
• Enemies who spawn with melee weapons will now generally spawn with weapons that match their stats.
  
• Quooz now gain movement speed from DEF. However it's at a slower rate than other races get from SPD. It also has a lower cap.
  
• Slime girls now properly lose the massive con per level bonus from slime, and properly gain more stat points.
  
• Slimes now heal for x10 more when eating corpses.
  
• Command Mastery now gives follower slots for every 10 INT as well as CHM.
  
• You can now staunch bleeding with textiles.
  
• Convoluted and annoying secret class added. You have been warned.
  
• Geminates now spawn with their twins <3
  
• Two-handed melee weapon enemies no longer spawn with lunge/dash.
  
• DEF no longer negates crits, this may be changed in the future again.
  
• Light damage now pierces armour again, but 10% of your armour will block it.
  
• Heavy Hits now makes one-handed swords work like two-handed swords. Two-handed swords still function the same as before, hitting slowly but harder.
  
• Bows now slow you by 50% while drawing them.
  
• Jogging mastery now doubles the bonus movespeed from SPD.
  
• Domples can no longer spawn on floor 1.
  
• Punch range has been increased.
  
• Chitterer and Fragshin's heal ability is far stronger now and activates at half health.
  
• You can now only pick up coins with free space in your inventory.
  
• Starting enemy stats are now capped based on their level, not current floor.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused you to get stuck in the dungeon forever if you kept visiting the castle endlessly.
  
• You can no longer sell items to the shopkeeper for less or more than you bought it for.
  
• Enemy Quooz now always spawn with quooz-made items.
  
• Enemies can now spawn with better gear depending on tier.
  
• Enemies can now see 50% further.
  
• Bloodweaver is now a 'secret' class that requires either berserker or bloodfallen.
  
• Bloodweaver has been modified to be a bit better and stronger to use.
  
• Bloodweaver enemies are very scary now send help pls.
  
• Dash base damage is now based on your punch damage. (So monk's iron fists give it DEF scaling)
  
• Axes now have 0 knockback.
  
• Thimbles can no longer 'dodge' effects like bleed, poison, etc.
  
• DEF now helps mitigate the slow from poison along with CON, they also mitigate it better.
  
• Coins now sparkle.
  
• Critters with DEF now have natural armour.
  
• Critters now attack faster if they have more DEX.
  
• Acid potion now melts items off your body if you apply it, including cursed items. This damages the items.
  
• Animated items now use ENG for their lunge/tackle.
  
• Summoner now comes from both scholar and leader.
  
• Most incantations, like summoner, healer, etc, now ALL use INT+energy for scaling.
  
• Summoner and Artificer minions have roughly 10% of the stats they used to.
  
• Certain summons now have no HP and use energy as HP.
  
• Summoner now starts with 1 point in circle.
  
• Wall clipping has probably been fixed.
  
• Found a massive bug that was destroying FPS. FPS isn't magically fixed, but should be a better hopefully.
  
• Furniture now reduce damage taken by a flat amount equal to their DEF. Furniture stats have also been raised.
  
• Berserker's death toll no longer doubles STR and DEX, but rather adds CON to STR and STR to DEX.
  
• Cure's heal is now halved for each debuff removed.
  
• Regeneration and Malpractice both work on INT+energy, now and the infinite part of them is a lot weaker.
  
• Gaining over 200% max health now makes you overweight and slow.
  
• Gaining over 200% max energy slowly leaks energy and damages you for the amount leaked.
  
• You can now bind dismantle to a key by right clicking the button.
  
• Wights now gain their race's regular points at rank 3 half living, instead of a flat amount.
  
• Round Toothed are now part of the domple racial group.
  
• Animated items now get 7 stat points per level.
  
• Allies will now sleep to heal but have no way to refill their hunger (yet)
  
• Malpractice now only targets living enemies.
  
• Lich's Phylactery can now be seen once you die, and it charge faster without enemies around.
  
• Anything that has energy instead of health will not use energy below 10 for incantations, to keep itself alive.
  
• Bread and slime now restore much less hunger.
  
• Many various bugs have been fixed and some QoL changes have been made.
  
• Boss Fight Changes:
  
• King now moves drastically faster than before.
  
• Banquet food now gives stats based on floor, not level.
  
• Stew now always gives minimum 10 CON.
  
• King gets pissed from being stunned/slowed too much and will occasionally cast cure to clear it.
  
• King is less cheesable during cutscenes.
  
• King's timer between attacks doesn't count up if stunned now.
  
• King self-stuns after doing his spin attacks.
  
• At the start of king fight, your phylactery will teleport to you.

And that's it for this patch, it's been a long few months so I'm relieved to have this out. Once again, I apologise for such a generic patch to have taken so long but sometimes life just doesn't go as planned.

I'm not entirely certain what the next patch will contain, the original idea was to add a materials system for the next update but that might be put on hold if I only have time for small patches. If I do land up doing small patches, I won't be surprised if I add a few classes and/or rank 2s and 3s for some classes.

In terms of translations, work is being done there. The new infoboxes for example are fully translatable and items as well, systems wise at least. Saving is still no where in sight, sadly. Unfortunately for both of these features, they're rather low priority compared to everything else in the game.

Thanks for reading and following development despite my months of absence, people like you who read to the end truly mean a lot to me, thank you! I'm almost always reachable through the discord if you want to talk to me there!

Friends in life, friends in death

Greetings Dredgers! Today I have a small update for you, the primary goal of this update is just some set up and housing keeping before I get to the big crafting updates.

Some of the work done has been setting the game up to be able to be translated, still a ways off from having the entire game load in text but it's getting there. Related to this, the options menu has been expanded so I finally have more space to actually put in options, which will be required eventually for loading language files.

• Auto Pickup - Allows you to disable almost all automatically picked up items.
  
• Start Runs Paused - Automatically pauses the game at the start of runs.
  
• Pause Time Scale - While playing during pause, the passage of time is affected by this scale.
  
• Time to Unpause - How quick the game goes from 0% world speed to full speed.
  
• Auto Unlocked Rusted Locks - Allows you to disable rusted keys being automatically used.
  
• Hold Down Incantations - Allows holding down incantations to spam them.
  
• Show Leaderboards - Allows you to disable the victory leaderboards.
  
• Mini HP Bars - Allows you to enable or disable various HP bars.
  
• Shockwaves - Allows toggling the distortion visual effects.
  
• Screen Tints - Allows toggling the screen discolouring effects.
  
• Freeze Alpha - Allows changing the alpha of the frost effect.

As per usual, changelog is just a compilation of my #dev_logs on the discord, so it will not contain every single change unfortunately, but most of the major ones at least:

• Expanded Options Menu
  
• Unlocked chests now have slightly better items
  
• Crates can now drop stuff that chests drop, though the prefixes are generally bad.
  
• Holding Alt now brings up the names of items on the ground, this is required for inspecting ground items.
  
• You can right click an item to close it's tooltip.
  
• Acid now melts 3 armour points per damage instead of 5
  
• Blue exp required for level up is now double green, rather than +1
  
• Your starting class now changes the contents of advanced mode shop.
  
• Enemies no longer sleep 24/7
  
• Skulltists no longer commit suicide if they use the animate incantation.
  
• Animate now gives 1 imbue per 10 energy spent since energy was changed to 10 per ENG.
  
• Crits have mostly been reverted to 10% chance per DEX for 10 extra damage. This is to make AI less evil with their crits. The Sniper and Taut bow still work on 1% per DEX for 100 extra damage.
  
• Flux flame now deals a minor amount of damage, but doesn't destroy all energy now for the most part.
  
• Cursed flame now stacks really well and deals a good amount of damage.
  
• Heavy hits and Disengage are now toggled rather than limited use buffs
  
• Caster enemies actually fight at range rather than resorting to punching you
  
• Pause state now carries through to the next floor
  
• Game will remember your last race/class combo until the game is closed
  
• Alt+Enter now properly switches fullscreen
  
• Armour Expertise now works for crabman armour
  
• Wink no longer over shoots your mouse
  
• Many Bug Fixes and some QoL stuff

Unfortunately no exciting changes, but occasionally patches like this just need to be done to keep things together. Of course I could have waited to finish the next patch before sending this out, but I would rather get out these sort of changes asap than hold onto them for a big patch.

Time to discuss plans for the next versions, aka crafting updates:
The idea is to hit everything even remotely related to crafting in the upcoming versions, this includes enchanting, butchering/cooking, trophy collection, herbalism, etc.

The goal for v45 is to get combining done. Combining is pretty much the shoddy crafting method that already exists in the game, that essentially will allow you to combine some items if they form a valid recipe. While I imagine by the end of the crafting updates that combining won't be utilised much, it's still an important option to have in case some recipes don't fit the format of other crafting methods.

The goal of the crafting updates is to give more methods to craft various items. For instance, I'd like cooking to be free form ingredient combining that gives various bonuses depending on ingredients synergising with each other. For weapons, I'd love to make those crafted in a similar way to tinker's construct, a mod from a certain block game, and I'd love for players to be able to add/remove prefixes through crafting. For enchanting, I'd like there to be something of a spell weaving minigame. And finally, I'd love to add alchemy after all the other crafting methods are complete!

I want to stress again, the only crafting method that will come out next patch is going to be combining, the other methods will probably each have their own version.

I'm honestly not sure what the timeline for the next version is going to be, but it'll be out when it's out, so looking forward to seeing you then!
Thanks for reading and following development :D

Greetings Dredgers! For anyone not following on the discord, this update probably seems quite out of place. After all, I did say crafting was going to be the next big update, so what gives? Well, in short, I decided to have a 'small' break from working on item systems, and decided to 'quickly' polish up one of the most broken/buggy things in the game, that being undead and the necro class.

Unfortunately this took much longer than expected, due to a few reasons: The update required far more work than expected, I got side-tracked a lot, and simply put, I was lazy for 2-3 weeks in which no work was accomplished. I am not trying to excuse my negligence, but I just wish to be transparent with you all.
But hey, we actually get to be a Lich now, so that's something!


Necro is the first class to reach rank 3! Which was probably inevitable in all honesty, I originally thought Pyro would be, but seeing as Necro was the only class other than shiner to be rank 2, it makes sense it'd be the first.
The main goal for Necro is to make it stick to it's theme more, and base each rank off a different state of undeath.

Necro I is the least changed of the first two ranks, with it's theme already being corpses mostly.
Imbue: Corpse functions mostly the same as before, with second rank giving a chance to auto-dominate raised corpses.
Dominate now shatters the mind of the living for the first two ranks, but dominates them on third.
Corpse Explosion is a 'new' skill, though mechanically it's similar to explosive rot, since that incantation was removed from Necro II. However, Corpse Explosion is far more powerful and useful compared to the previous explosive rot.

Necro II is far different compared to what it used to be, with it's theme now being based off skeletons and bones, with the ghost stuff being moved to rank 3.
Imbue: Skeleton still functions mostly the same as before.
Rip Bone is part-offensive part-defensive skill. You rip bones from enemies and corpses, which float around you blocking damage. Ripping bones from enemies permanently reduces their defence.
Calcium-collector is a butcher type skill, allowing you to rip up corpses for bones. The skill also allows you to repair and fortify skeletal allies, including yourself if you happen to be of the boned variety.

Necro III is the 'final' rank of Necro, with it's theme being based on Ghosts, Souls and the general mastery of necromancy.
Imbue: Soul is the ability you can use as a ghost to possess bodies, whether undead or allies. Once you get Rank 2, it allows you to leave your body as well. Rank 3 allows you to possess enemies if you pass an INT check.

Soul Steal allows you to steal energy from enemies, and at rank 3 you can consume ghosts to permanently raise your INT.
Afterlife is a passive that continuously raises creatures around you. Upon death, Living become zombies, zombies become skeletons, and skeletons become ghosts.
And finally, Afterlife rank 4, the first rank 4 ability in the game, allows you to transform into a Lich!

The Lich is designed to be the ultimate form of necromancy in Dredgers. A Lich technically counts both as a living and animated being. It doesn't need to eat, and has much greater stats than most races. Upon getting Afterlife rank 4, you lose your race as it is replaced by Lich.

Lich has about 8 passives in total, majority of them coming from other undead.
It's primary passive is it's phylactery. As long as it's phylactery exists, it's body shall be rebuilt upon destruction. While the phylactery is destroyable by enemies if they find it, you're basically immortal if you keep it out of harm's way.

Now you might be wondering "Wait a second, that sounds broken as hell." And yes, you'd be correct. This race/class pretty much makes it possible to never die. I've been thinking more about he game's balance and feel I need to take more liberties with how strong I make things. After all, it's a single player game with resetting progress, being able to become obscenely powerful is fun, and being undying is a huge part of the Lich's theme. So going forwards you may see me take this stance more when it comes to balancing things, or unbalance rather.

So as I mentioned previously, a big part of this update was working on the undead side of necromancy.
The biggest change here being that the 'Corpse' (aka zombie) and 'Skeleton' races no longer overwrite your original race. So if you're a human, you won't suddenly lose the ability to sprint upon becoming a corpse. However, certain abilities do get disabled, such as Gloomp's 'Useless body' becoming disabled while undead.
Corpses are mostly the same after the update, the most notable change being that they can now have their racial abilities levelled up, and eventually become wights, which are simply the 'used to being dead' version of corpses.
Similarly, skeletons are mostly the same, with their notable change being their 'cold bones' passive now makes them more resilient against projectiles, since this is a big part of skeleton thematics. Similar to corpses, they can level up their skills, but don't have another form to transform into, since in theory that's the lich.
Ghosts have the largest changes of undead, while still mostly retaining what they were before. Instead of manually firing soul burn orbs, they automatically spawn homing versions of these that damage and drain energy from enemies. 'Boo' now stuns enemies that have energy drained from them.
Unlike the other forms of undead, ghosts no longer turn your body into a ghost, rather a ghost is spawned on top of it, and the corpse stays intact. This means your race is not transferred to the ghost, so all racial abilities are lost. Fair warning, if you vacate the body of your lich as a ghost, and you die, you'll be dead forever, as your phylactery only guarantees the reconstruction of your body.

While getting sidetracked is partially the reason this update took so long to come out, it has resulted in some nice things for the game:

Explosions were reworked due to 'corpse explosion' requiring new effects.

First thing you'll notice is that the explosion doesn't damage it's zone instantly, rather travels outward, pushing back stuff as it reaches it.
Second is the fancy new sprites and effects, showing the precise location of the explosion, rather than vague particle effects.
Third is that doors can now be destroyed, same as all other furniture! (Not locked doors, sorry)
Fourth and last: there's a huge distortion shockwave going out! I bought this effect from a developer called "K.Blank" on Itch.io, so I can't take much credit for it, but I love this effect so much, you'll see I've used it it one or two more places in-game. I don't trust myself not to use it more either, where appropriate of course.

The game now tells discord all about the terrible build you're currently attempting!


Some of the GUI has been tweaked, mostly around classes to make them easier to read:

The colours for different ranks now more accurately reflects the game's tier order (Copper, Silver, Gold, Gem), with small markers underneath for even easier reading. The class 'pips' at the bottom have also been adjusted to be far clearer!

During the patch, I identified that stat calculations were running particularly slow. This was particularly apparent after the item update, where the calculations for equipment stats became more complicated. As a result, I've gotten the game to cache the results of stat calculations, which has vastly improved FPS in the castle/lab regions, and in theory should help swarms of summons and enemies process faster. The drawback is that enemy stats only update about every 2 seconds, this shouldn't have too many gameplay implications, outside of cultist and gloomp builds, though I've gotten some ideas on how to fix this in future patches.

As per usual, changelog is just a compilation of my #dev_logs on the discord, so it will not contain every single change unfortunately, but most of the major ones at least:

• A new type of 'internal' damage has been added, this allows certain damages to bypass external defences like armour. (So poison and being on fire are internal, while acid and fireball damage are external)
  
• Electricity no longer strips armour points, but still bypasses and adds the armour points to it's damage value.
  
• Armour now blocks fire attacks and doesn't give fire stacks.
  
• King's health has been halved since he's a thick boy who takes ages to defeat.
  
• Herbs now stack better and more intuitively.
  
• Dash will no longer get stopped by furniture it destroyed (probably)
  
• Enemy crits have been disabled on floor 1 and 2. Not really happy with how enemy crits work so expect changes in the future.
  
• Explosions now knock you back even if you are the owner/creator of the explosion.
  
• Projectiles now pass through furniture without being destroyed, but the furniture still takes damage.
  
• Doors and Grates can now be destroyed same as other furniture if unlocked.
  
• Grates are now 'see-through' so enemies can see through them, and you can shoot through them if you wish.
  
• Energy now regens 100% of the bar per 1 food (previously it was 100% for 5 food)
  
• If your race does not have a hunger bar, you have a half speed penalty on regenerating energy.
  
• Skeletons and Ghosts now lose energy at a set rate, and don't regen energy at all by ENG values. So having high ENG means you'll stay alive longer, but you'll always be losing energy outside of your passives.
  
• ENG now gives 10 max energy per point instead of 5.
  
• Rune Hat now gives 5 max energy per ENG rather than 1.
  
• Zombies no longer automatically destroy corpses, Grave Hunger is now a skill which can be used to eat corpses.
  
• Gloomps actually have a skeleton sprite now, whoops.
  
• Running out of energy as a Skeleton now means you die, same as enemies.
  
• Enemies now longer die if they run out of energy as a corpse.
  
• Every race now has a 'skeleton' sprite that's used when they become a Lich, some of these are temporary.
  
• Summons can now only drop EXP the first time you kill them.
  
• The chance for green EXP to drop after enough has been collected has been changed to 20% from 50%
  
• Blue EXP always drops even if the threshold is reached.
  
• Magus robe now prevents Energy regeneration upon taking damage for 1 second, to prevent Seemujhs being immune and to make magus robe enemies more bearable.
  
• Grappler can now be accessed from the fighter tree.
  
• Enemies no longer level SPD unless it's important to their class. Sort of an experimental change.

Phew, quite an update again, but we're one step further into the game's gradual improvement!

As stated before, I've sort of grown adverse to discussing my long-term plans, but I do feel it's fine for the semi-immediate future. Current idea is to do one more unplanned patch, where I just clean up bugs and do QoL changes. After that, I'm thinking of starting the first part of crafting changes, that being the combination side of things. Beyond that point it's a bit of a toss up to what I'll work on after, either more crafting or switch over to translation system before there's too much text in the crafting menus.

Thanks for reading, I'm glad you made it this far, dedicated fans like you are the best :)
Hopefully the next patch will be done far quicker than two months, hope to see you then!

Well the big day is finally here dredgers! I've been working on this update for about 4-5 months and it's been, phew, quite a workload. I ended up touching on just about every part of the game while doing this, and since I was rewriting an integral system of the game, pretty much everything kept breaking, the last 2-4 weeks were delayed due to an infinite loop bug which was being a pain to track down, since it left no error message. But that's all past and gone, that update is ready for release more or less!

This post has a lot to read through and digest, so prepare yourself. The first 3 headlines should be enough to get an idea of the update if you don't want to read the whole thing.

Arrow modifiers now stack, so each fletcher skill (and the starting arrow modifiers) now uses a different layer. So for example you can create a fire-bomb-splinter arrow! Not only that, but as the picture above demonstrates, many biological projectiles can now use this system! Currently the trunkits, slimes and visic projectiles use this system. So if you ever wanted to use multishot or ricochet with slime balls, now you can! Majority, if not all, arrow skills should apply to the biological projectiles :D

Items have been rewritten from the bottom up! However, I must stress, crafting hasn't been improved, that's planned for 1-3 versions away, depending how I prioritise things.

Items are obviously the big ticket item on the new feature list. Items can now have multiple prefixes, and the tooltips for them are far more organised. On top of being easier to read, having multiple prefixes gives items quite a bit more variety than before, making choosing between items somewhat more interesting!

You can also now inspect items lying around the floor, in case you ever wanted to for whatever reason.
A somewhat annoying change has been made that you'll need to get used to: You now need to right click items in order to read the tooltip, it'll make sense once you're in-game, but it can be confusing to work with at first. If you want to quick use an item, you can shift+RMB it.

Alternatively, you can open the tooltip and choose an action, for items with multiple actions.
In terms of new items or prefixes, there aren't many I regret to say, that was something I planned to leave for the crafting update, since this update was intended mostly as a rewrite rather than an expansion of content.

Books now display their incantations far more clearly.

Shoes and Charms now give stats per level, so they're useful late game and less powerful early.

Wands have received a large nerf some love during the item update. Previous they used to scale with INT, could be swung, and all had the same swing speed. This had the side effect of making ice wand the best melee weapon in the game at a whopping 400% INT scaling per hit. Wands now scale off ENG, and cost energy to deal damage. So while wands still hit hard, they actually have a use cost, to bring them more in line.
On that note, any weapon that gains an INT, CHM or ENG scaling will use energy to deal the damage from those scalings.
Wand mastery(now called expertise to avoid confusion) has been changed to make incantations scale off ENG, and also allows you to apply a 100% ENG scaling to any melee weapon that doesn't have an ENG scaling already.

Wands and Swords have also received a glow effect if they use energy when attacking.
In terms of armour, any armour with an INT, ENG or CHM scaling will block with energy. So if you have 10 ENG, and armour with 100% ENG scaling, you can block 10 damage per attack by consuming energy equal to the amount blocked.


I've planned the merchant class even before the first steam release, even hinting at it in the identify description, and honestly now seemed like the best time to add it. The class isn't anything special itself, but it fills some gaps the game had in terms of skills.

As per usual, changelog is just a compilation of my #dev_logs on the discord, so it will not contain every single change unfortunately, but most of the major ones at least:

• Armour can now block acid, but takes 5 armour to block 1 acid damage.
  
• Shields can now block acid regularly like other damage types.
  
• Crabmen now halve armour instead of destroying it completely.
  
• Torches now set items above them in the inventory on fire if they are flammable. (because pain)
  
• Animated items now move around the inv. (for more pain)
  
• Selling items now gives 10% (5% for Quooz, 50% for merchants) of the items worth, +1% per CHM. Capped at 100% selling.
  
• Right clicking to cancel using a scroll no longer consumes the scroll.
  
• There are now two types of flames beyond regular fire. They range from useless to catastrophically bad for you, so avoid em if you somehow find em.
  
• Cannibalism should be fixed. Ninth lol
  
• Bleed and Poisoned have been changed but it's complicated and I don't wanna get into it.
  
• Poisoned now stacks higher, dealing damage slower to high CON targets
  
• Bleed deals damage faster to high CON targets
  
• Crafting classes are now 3 levels long, and their 'craft' skills are masteries.
  
• Majority of crafting recipes are pretty jank right now, only requiring 1 of each material.
  
• All furniture has a 20% chance to drop material, 100% if you use scavenge as a skill.
  
• Materials and Torches are classed as 'trash' so the peddler refuses to buy them, this is to allow players to not feel the need to strip down the dungeon for cash.
  
• Slimes are now enemies with everything and everyone.
  
• Boots actually change your characters texture if you're not wearing something with a dress.
  
• Boots now give stats scaling on level, rather than a flat bonus.
  
• Food now restores percentages of health and energy, rather than a flat amount.
  
• Eggs can sometimes be found. Careful they can shatter.
  
• Rotting meat can sometimes be found (because more pain)
  
• Books now offer a minor stat per level reflecting their non-incantation knowledge.
  
• You'll actually become fluxed upon miscasting, rather than being able to cast infinitely until you achieve a proper cast.
  
• Books can be cast from inventory rather than limb if you want.
  
• Bodies are automatically butchered and trophy collected if destroyed by damage.
  
• Potions now let you get the application effect without requiring you to toss it at the wall near yourself.
  
• Potions now change to a colour that's consistent between runs once discovered.
  
• Some melee weapons use pushback instead of knockback. Pushback doesn't prevent enemies moving, but will constantly push them away while the weapon is swinging through them.
  
• Collect trophy can now be used to get the King's third sword.
  
• Various item sprites have been updated.
  
• Weapons make a very fancy scrape effect upon hitting walls.
  
• Bows now have drastically reduced crit rate, but crits now deal 100 damage by default rather than 10. Careful of enemy archers since they have a habit of deleting you with 5% chance somehow.
  
• Fire coating (previously fire arrow tip) requires some form of flame on your person to activate.
  
• Explosions are now raycasted, so firebomb no longer wipes the map.
  
• Arrow coatings (previous arrow tips in Archer), can now all be accessed at rank 1(fire, poison, glue) and don't conflict with the other skills from fletcher. Rank 2 simply increases their effects.
  
• Arrow fletching can now all be accessed at rank 1. Rank 2 and 3 increase the effects.
  
• Heavy tips (bomb, sand, water)can now all be accessed at rank 1. They prevent arrows piercing unless you have rank 3.
  
• Arrow mods(hook, serrated, splinter) can now all be accessed at rank 1.
  
• Bows that previously edited arrows now edit arrow tips, and therefore are incompatible with heavy tips.
  
• Explosion knockback has been given a cap so obscene damage doesn't make enemies fly across the melt.
  
• Elves no longer have nightvision, instead they get every primary mastery. It's funner than it sounds!
  
• Arrow modifications now work for biological projectiles.
  
• Trunkit's thorn shot is now cone shaped. The one that activates upon being hit is still circle shaped.
  
• Trunkit's defensive thorn burst now works even if only your armour took damage.
  
• Scoped bow has been renamed sniper bow, and heavily emphasises crits even more.
  
• Dark Steel Weapons have been renamed to Wrought weapons.
  
• Putting points into DEX now only increases melee swing speed if it's under STR, having more DEX than STR won't help. Additionally this increase affects the exhaustion you get from using melee weapons, so your DPS will actually be higher by putting points in DEX.
  
• Same for bows but reversed STR and DEX obviously.
  
• Pick(axe) is now an item rather than a skill, which functions much nicer.
  
• Rapiers now deal DEX damage.
  
• Deathly pale will no longer kill you (directly at least).
  
• Staff Mastery(now called expertise) has had rank 1 and 2 combined. Rank 2 now allows the damage to ramp up over time the longer you use it.
  
• Charms now give 1 stat per level. As a result, players using CHM are assumed to have double CHM than other stats, so CHM has been balanced around this. Prime example is that bard songs now give only 25% of CHM rather than 50%.
  
• Any item that gives stats per level cannot give more stats than what your current base is. This is to prevent every build from grabbing any stat they need but don't wanna build.
  
• Leader's mantle has been nerfed to 1 DEF per follower, rather than the followers DEF. Not 100% happy with this so subject to change.
  
• Legionnaire's helmet has been changed, it now increases your effective level for each follower you have. Aka it makes charms and shoes stronger if you have more followers.
  
• Hotstalks are now DEX and STR, rather than SPD and STR, since we already have a herb that gives SPD but no DEX herb.
  
• Animate now consumes all your energy and uses that to imbue the item.
  
• Rage prefix now makes you gain berserk upon taking damage rather than randomly.
  
• Leich don't lose food while resting (unless healing ofc)
  
• Materials autopickup only if you have the material already in your inventory.
  
• You can actually see what spells you heard now with Scribe's copy ability.
  
• Skulltists can't kill themselves with wands, instead they will always be left at 1 energy.
  
• Similarly, Cure and Regenerate always leave you at 1 energy.
  
• Crabmen now gain 1 DEF and SPD per level since they can't wear boots. It's a shame they still suck.
  
• Sprites (the little yellow ranged summon) now uses homing missiles.
  
• Sandin now gain 3 points per level, since getting 4 sort of negated their weakness by level 5.
  
• Bloodfallen now get 2(up from 1) points per level until I figure out what to do with them.
  
• Scilits will probably take over the world oneday.
  
• Enemy caster no longer get warper abilities since it was annoying as hell and not very effective.
  
• Jar slimes occasionally spawn as pot slimes. These actually scale with floor and hurt like hell.
  
• Enemy stats have been more or less completely reworked, hopefully they should feel a little more consistent now rather than level 10 enemies on floor 5 handing your backside to you.
  
• Fire Cape now reduces fire damage by half, and gives energy while on fire.
  
• EXP orbs are now based on realworld time rather than game time, so they won't be super slow if you have high SPD.
  
• Songs now disable if you're knocked out to prevent bloodlords getting stunlocked by song of healing.
  
• Enemies now have shoes.
  
• Smite now requires line of sight to your enemies.
  
• Chant no longer reduces the stats of enemies by 100%, rather 25% now, same as bard songs.
  
• Quooz-made prefix now affects cooking.
  
• I can't believe you actually read through this entire changelog, you beast. Honestly you deserve a reward for this.
  
• Stardust now gives 1 CHM per dust, capped on your base CHM. It also lets you double your light damage if you have more dust than your cap.
  
• Skull collection is similar. Skull collection now caps at 100%, but lets you deal double damage by using skull stacks.

That was a lot to get through, but thanks for even reading this far, I'm glad some players even love the game enough to do that!

So as for future updates. This has become a topic I'm not a fan of talking about, since it sort of straps me down into a line of work. Even if I claim my future plans are only plans and may change, I feel it still creates expectation. Currently I have 3 plans from the the 'post-holiday plans' news post, that being translation system, saves and crafting.
I'm still going to look into translations and such, though chances are I may leave it for later. Saving is somewhat up in the air too, it might turn out to be super easy or super hard, so I'll see.
Crafting is something I am incredibly excited for, so hopefully I'll start work on that sometime soon. I did originally plan it for v43 but I'm thinking of doing one or two smaller patches just to have a bit of space between these huge releases. I also may just do the crafting update in parts, since I have quite a bit planned for it.

Minor Note: Buggy beta branch will be disabled until I get started on a bigger patch.

Once again, thanks for reading and playing the game, means a lot to have players who enjoy and look forward to updates! And thanks for the patience, sorry it's taken a while to get to this point
Have fun and be blessed! After all, you wouldn't want to accidentally become cursed would you?

Greetings dredgers, sorry for lack of updates over the past 3 months or so. I've been working on the item rework as I stated in my plans and it's taken a whiiiile. However, thankfully the update is now reaching the final stages of testing, bugfixes and qol improvements!

So to recap the major points of this update:

• Rewritting the item system to allow for stuff like saving/translations.
  
• Allowing items to have more than one prefix so loot (and eventually crafting) is more interesting.
  
• Reworking item types in general to be improved.
  
• Reworking the item tooltip so players get as much information as possible.

This update will not contain any new crafting stuff, in fact most of the crafting stuff will be more or less the same until next update.

As of today, every item has been recoded into the game, and all the item systems are finished. Since a huge chunk of the game has been edited or rewritten, there's plenty of bugs which need to be found. So in order to avoid just throwing out the update into the wild like I usually do, I've decided to create a buggy beta branch on steam for players to test. You can enter the beta on steam with the password IDoNotCareAboutBugs
The beta will be very buggy and you will probably lose many runs to random bugs, which I imagine isn't particularly fun. However if you do decide to play, I would love bug reports over on the discord!

I'm sorry for the radio silence as I worked over the past few months, Once I realised I should probably say something to confirm I'm not dead, I didn't want to make a news post after all this time without at least something being available for you guys to try out.

Thank you for your patience if you're still sticking around, and I'll hopefully have a stable version out soon o/

It's finally the end of the year, and as much as I'd love to keep working on Dredgers, I know I'll burn myself out if I don't take a holiday, as I've been working about 13 months on end without much in the way of holidays. (In all honestly, I'm quite burnt out already, but the hype from launch has kept me going) So after the next small patch, game development will be paused for about 2-3 weeks.

So my plans for next year are not 100% set in stone, but I have an idea of what I'd like to do:

The first and major thing is rewriting the item system. The way the system currently works is that each item has values that are loaded from code when the item is created. This means that, unless I create an item, I cannot get any info about it. Obviously this is quite bad, but I never realised it'd be an issue when I first coded items. Items are fairly complicated and a big part of dredgers, so re-coding them is going to be possibly the biggest batch of work I've done so far. However, once items are moved to a database format, it'll greatly improve my ability to work with them, allowing things like translations, saving, better craft/prefixes, etc.

Secondly, speaking of crafting, I'd like to work on crafting after items are rewritten. I have a few ideas on how to make it far more interesting, rather than a generic 'select item from list and craft it'. The idea is to make crafting a process, and depending on what you do during the process, the quality of the item is changed. So for instance using extra metal during crafting will make the item reinforced, or taking a break to save hunger may result in the quality being worse. I have other ideas for cooking, enchanting, scribing, etc, but those aren't quite as fleshed out yet.

Thirdly, translations. Translations are sort of a problem for me, while I'd like to add a translation system so the game can be translated, I can't particularly afford translation fees due to how much text the game has. Not only that, but officially supporting translations would terribly slow down the game's development, since I have to wait for the newest update to get translated before pushing every update. So as a result, while I want to add a translation system, I simply cannot imagine supporting official translations. I'm thinking of adding workshop support for language files, that way people could download player made translations for their language.

Fourth, Saves. Saves have been heavily requested by a lot of players. I must admit, I feel saves are a lot more work than they are worth. Thankfully, the item rewrite will make it easier. Saves will probably only be possible in between levels, since having to completely save level data would be a nightmare.

These are the major plans I have, and since they are plans they may change, naturally.

You may also notice I haven't mentioned what I talked about in the previous news post: memory/mind, classes and themed content update.
Specifically for memory/mind, I was not happy with how the system was shaping out so I've put it back for now. I do still want to add it, but I need to figure out a better/non-clunky way of doing it.
Rank 2 and 3 Classes is still a goal, but it's long term and will happen over time. The class HUD and learning screen rewrite over the last few updates has brought me closer to getting there.
A themed content update is still being planned, but I feel like I should be nailing down fundamental systems like items first before adding more content. This is just a smarter way of doing things so that I don't waste time redoing work that I could have done after.

Overall my goal is to work on Dredgers and keep improving it. While I do make plans, I like being able to change them on the fly as I find things with higher priority, rather than sticking with a plan for the sake of it. I also know people have been asking for new content, and while I really want to add it myself, I know it'll be smarter to get the game systems into a better state before I start diving into new content.

Thanks for reading and playing the game, hope you've enjoyed, See ya next year!

Been wanting to put out this update for a few days now, but many events sort of came together so I was only able to put out the game last night.

The main feature of this update is the improved class menu, which has been requested by many people. You can now see exactly which classes lead into others, and see what each ability does in each class. The graphics look somewhat better as well as a result:


And, as you can see in the image above, the three classes previously after cultist are now in shiner. This was for a few reasons:

• Players would like to go priest+solar abilities, but couldn't before due to priest and cultist incompatibility. (the AI priests were already doing this which was extra painful)
  
• The class abilities were often times more like incantations rather than skills, so by moving them to shiner I can make them actually be incantations.
  
• Thematically shiner makes far more sense as a lead in for these 3 class, while cultist made 0 sense. I'd like to make cultist lad into more darker classes in the future, like void/corruption/aberration/eldritch based stuff.
  
• Allows me to merge blinding flash with Solar's version, letting me give Solar a new awesome ability, solar laser.
  
• I want to try and move away from CHM being a damage stat, so the abilities becoming incantations (and thus scaling off of INT) works out quite well. There is still some CHM scaling though, so don't worry, priest+solar shiner will be viable.

I also took the time to work on the various skills and make them less janky, so they should hopefully be more fun to play with!

Changelog for V41 and previous patches:

• Cold night is now a passive.
  
• AI can now walk through locked doors again, but will not walk through mechanical doors.
  
• Enemy dash attacks are now delayed and show a attack warning/marker.
  
• More fire damage tweaks, again.
  
• Stardust is now affected by scythe
  
• The is now a flash-blind status effect used by light abilities, rather than the regular blind. From the player point of view, this is basically just like a flashbang from other games. AI act during flashes as if their target is in the same spot as the moment the flash went off.
  
• Cultist mask now just straight up inverts CHM.
  
• You can now wear charms on antlers!
  
• Dashes have been reworked! The main point to know about this is that most dashes now merge together as one ability when used. You can also slightly turn/drift during dashes.
  
• Crabmen now always have their armour restored over 4 seconds, rather than it taking longer the more DEF they have.
  
• Quooz now have their SPD set to 0 permanently. Whatever the SPD value would be is added as a bonus to DEF. I'm aware this causes some flipflopping with heavy armours, so looking to fix that.
  
• You can now get multiple scrolls/potions in chests.
  
• Dismantle is no longer prevented from being silenced.

Once again, sorry for writing this update post late! Just had quite a bit on my plate recently. The next big patch will probably handle items, since those need to be rewritten. No idea how long that will be since it's a lot of work, as I effectively need to rewrite every item in the game. But it'll come with quite a few improvements, such as being able to see what items do before you craft them :D