Hero portrait stars now based on level instead of abilities
Windwalk no-longer breaks stealth
Additional logging to try to catch startup crashes
Fix ambush tooltip to say 2 heroes instead of 3
Fix hard-to-read text on Legacy Points help screen
Tools: fixed crash on mod config

Chinese players:

We have some great news to announce. We've been working with WhisperGames to localize Wildermyth into Simplified Chinese.



As a text-heavy, story-driven game, Wildermyth is rather difficult to localize, but we've been working on the Chinese localization for several months, and made we've made pretty good progress. Based on our current pace, we expect to release the Simplified Chinese version in 2020 Q3.

We will keep you posted about the exact release schedule.

Thank you for all your support and we hope you enjoy the game!


Regards,
Worldwalker Games LLC & WhisperGames Team

Legacy Campaigns are here! We're launching a 3-chapter generic campaign that's designed for legacy heroes. If you've been craving a new challenge, we've got it for you. By default, you'll start the campaign with calamities based on the total tiers of the legacy heroes you bring in, and the campaign recruits, interval behavior, and threat pace have all been tuned to create an appropriate challenge. As part of this work, you can now play our existing campaigns with starting calamities as well, so you have much more control over the challenge level.

Let us know what you think, because we're not done. We plan to implement 5 chapter legacy campaigns as well, but before we do we'll be putting in some more "end game" content in terms of making sure that each monster group can scale in threat a bit further. (This will probably mean additional monsters, which we're really excited about.)

You'll also notice that recruiting at towns feels more consistent between legacy heroes and new recruits, and retiring heroes can train up rookies.

Finally, we're very excited about our UI art overhaul. Almost all of the menus and dialogs in the game are getting a visual upgrade. It's part 1 because it does not yet include the HUD. Overall things should look a bit more consistent and "finished."

Here's the patch notes.

Legacy Hero Campaign
* A new 3 chapter generic campaign balanced for legacy heroes
UI Art Overhaul Part I
* All menus and dialogs have fancy new art
* New game dialog: art treatment for campaigns
* HUD has not yet been updated
Ambushes now only happen with 2 heroes
Ambushes don't scale so much in later chapters
Upon hero retirement, player may now choose a rookie to train up
Choosing legacy recruit abilities now happens before Labors
Resources panel now shows what you'll gain at the end of the chapter
Can now spend a promotion to update mythwalkers
Added keystone fights to final chapters of generic campaigns
Retreat button disabled when not relevant
Fix a bug with beard streaks
Fix a bug on maiming where a 1-handed weapon would get replaced too
Tools: intervals can now control number of foe cards added in chapter

If you're liking the game, you can help us out by leaving a review :-)

We took a look at the feedback we've been getting and we felt that the game has gotten too easy in recent patches, particularly on the higher difficulty levels. We've made a collection of changes to normalize the difficulty levels (remove unfair / unfun spikes), and we're adjusting crafting costs.

We're not finished, but we wanted to get these out now. We're still working on ways to opt in to more challenging experiences, and a big part of that is turning on legacy hero campaigns. There will be more to come soon on that. In addition, the UI rework is going well, so we should be able to deliver two large roadmap items pretty soon.

New Event: Storied Bones
New Victory Event: Apologies
New Victory Event: A Named Place
Updated Quest: Needed Elsewhere
Several new Tidings
Renamed difficulty levels:

• Storyteller
  
• Adventurer
  
• Tragic Hero
  
• Walking Lunch

Difficulty Rework: The game's getting harder!

• Some doors start open at higher difficulties
  
• Tower map is larger when more enemies are present
  
• Large open maps now delay some enemy spawns
  
• Walking Lunch difficulty now +1 card in every fight
  
• Tier 2 and 3 weapons are more expensive
  
• Reduced rate of weapon and armor drops after fights

Quellingmoss now works with all melee attacks, including theme attacks
Added flying step sound for enemies with wings
Gear rewards now have a small chance to be higher tier
We now disallow editing hero personality during a game
Added particles to Will of the Forest tree spawn
Fix a bug with prediction for Wolf Frenzy
Fix a bug with vine arm entangle
Fix a bug where stasised heroes could use reaction strikes
Fix some missing scenery names
Always-On Mods:

• Added an option for mod authors of mods that grant gear, abilities...
  
• Always-On mods can be configured in the options menu
  
• Should allow heroes to look correct in the legacy browser

Fixed several typos and text bugs
Fixed a bug with Skysinger AI
Tools: new combat modifiers: Stealth, Haste, Exhaustion, Anticipation
Tools: can now spawn correct ruins scenery using <Env> tag
Tools: combat modifiers now work when using missionPlanOverride
Tools: exposed several more balance numbers for modding
Tools: work towards deprecating old hard-coded campaigns

This patch we're adding a bunch more character customization options. You can now customize your gender, body type, voice, and attraction. As part of that, you can now create non-binary and bisexual heroes.

We've added a cool new overlay when you're about to execute an ability, instead of the boring colored gradient. And there's a lot of little bug fixes and quality of life improvements for modders, including several improvements driven by modder requests on Discord.

We're making strong progress towards the first section of our Roadmap, and we want to try to close that off in the next few patches.

The UI art reskin is going to be a big piece of that, and after that we should be able to turn our attention to the Thrixl campaign. As ever, we're adding new content and adjusting old content as needed.

We aim to ship a patch every two weeks, with mixed success. :-)

New Event: Music of the Deep
Reworked Quest: For a Friend
Added customization options for gender, body type, voice, and attraction
Can now set gender to non-binary (they/them)
Can now set attraction to anyone (bi)
Improved AI pathing - previously sometimes got stuck, shouldn't anymore
Many Ranged enemies will stand further back now
Added a few new scenery pieces
Added a new hair style
Sharktrap now 1 trap per tile instead of 1 big trap (buff)
Damaging scenery now shows damage text and health bar
Hovering over scenery now shows health bar
Improved scenery interfusion tooltips
Added sfx for hero wings and stone legs, and corrupted ground
Added graphics options to turn off some or most particles
Replaced solid gradient ability overlay with fancy textures
Adjusted particles on selected and hovered units to be more visible
Archery now works with morthagi crossbow and shooting star
Added a content note for amputation / loss of limbs
Added SFX for monster search, windwalk, adjusted XP SFX
Fixed some overly-deterministic abilities (random targets now random)
Fixed some typos and bad tags
Fixed a bad interaction between Frenzy and Broadswipes
Fixed bug where 2-handed weapons were not properly replaced when maimed
Fixed some rare player-reported bugs (NPEs in logs)
Fixed some bugs with camera movement
Fixed a bug where dead heroes could show up in Monarchs Ch3 events
Fixed bug where heroes with 4 theme limbs would not get a mortal choice
Fixed a bug where some lamps didn't provide cover when extinguished
Tools: log mod name in addition to id when there's an error in a mod
Tools: removed many old/obsolete stories
Tools: added an Objective to test aspects
Tools: added an Objective to test arbitrary expressions
Tools: LegacyQuery now only shows fields relevant to selected type
Tools: Added ForEach outcome, which executes an outcome for each target
Tools: 10 most recent effects/aspects/comics now at top of list
Tools: Holding Ctrl when expanding/collapsing a node acts recursively
Tools: Can now grant gear based on expressions (e.g. chapter number)
Tools: Can now specify combatants based on expressions
Tools: added TIDING_WRAPUP_FINAL for "very last panel" during credits
Tools: Can now play a save file that uses a workshop mod that you own

Our friends at Lost Pilgrims Studio have just released the Open-World main campaign for Vagrus - The Riven Realms. Vagrus is darker than Wildermyth, with more nitty-gritty caravan management and a historical "dark/fallen Roman Empire" setting.

Vagrus is a turn-based, open-world, dark fantasy RPG. The development team has been playing table-top RPGs (like DnD) on their home-brew setting, the Riven Realms, for over two decades, then based this game on it, so it has incredibly deep lore and immersive stories.

They have just posted a huge announcement on their Steam development blog about releasing the open-world main campaign of Vagrus to all their Crowdfunding Backers in preparation of bringing the game to Steam.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/909660/Vagrus__The_Riven_Realms





Vagrus is an award-winning Roleplaying Game with strategy elements, where the player takes the role of a vagrus - a sort of a caravan leader who makes a living on a strange and dangerous dark fantasy world by leading a traveling company on all kinds of ventures.

• A DARK CONTINENT
  A vast realm is yours to explore, filled with unique locations, strange factions, lurking dangers, and a slew of characters you can interact with.
  
  
  
• BRANCHING NARRATIVE
  A large selection of longer and shorter stories make up the game’s narrative in the form of events and quests. The choices you make in these can significantly affect the characters and the world around you.
  
  
  
• TURN-BASED COMBAT
  Take part in turn-based, tactical combat that involves your characters and a large variety of enemies, both humanoid and monstrous. Use a range of character skills and abilities to succeed. Fight against outlaws and monsters commanding your whole traveling company in pitched battles for resources.
  
  
  
• RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
  Most journeys have to be planned and prepared for carefully, lest they end in disaster. Manage your supplies, cargo, and crew effectively to survive. Take on contracts and follow rumors or trade opportunities.
  
  
  
• UNIQUE COMPANIONS
  The player can recruit fully-developed characters into the caravan to serve in versatile roles, such as scoutmaster, guard captain, spellweaver, or slavedriver. Each of them comes with their own background and personal quests lines.
  

If you are interested in trying Vagrus, its Demo will be featured by Steam between June 9 and 16.
Sign up for the Summer Festival, and be sure to Wishlist and follow Vagrus for up-to-date information about its development milestones, upcoming features, and ultimately to get notified about its release when the time comes.

This patch addresses a fair bit of feedback we've been getting re: theme attacks, potency, armor, and Battledance. The goal with themes and potency is to allow theme attacks to scale into the late game better than they do currently, while not outshining weapons. We want transformations to (always?) be a mixed bag, and this patch also tries to fix some cases where transformations were purely good.

Overall we think this is a big buff to heroes, so enjoy it while it lasts, we'll probably work on monsters next :-P

We also started working more on custom maps to match specific situations, and some of that is ready to roll, and there's a couple new events as well.

In addition, it's now possible to "lock" relationships from the character sheet, which you can use to make sure lovers and rivals remember each other across time and space (all games).

Normally we try to release every two weeks, but lately that's been hard due to the situation, so we might roll with every 3 weeks for a while until child care is available again.


New Event: Burden of Beasts
New Event Chain: Shiny, Dug Up, The Merchant
New Event: Familial
Reworked Quest: Dodging Destiny
Lover and Rival relationships can now be "locked" across all games
Adjusted (increased) armor values on heavy armor
Reduced dodge of Wildergard and Traveltraff
Battledance now only affects melee attacks
Vigilance now grants an extra 1+potency attacks instead of infinite
Theme Attack and Potency Rework!!
Adjusted most theme attacks to scale with bonus damage AND potency
Replaced potency stat on wands and staves with spell damage
Interfusion abilities use spell damage, theme attacks don't
Mystic armor also gives spell damage instead of potency
Rebalanced theme leg stats
Separated Damage and Potency augments (going forward)
Reworked and rebalanced several theme attacks
Adjusted bonus damage and potency given on level up
Many class abilities now scale with potency (damage or range)
Abilities now show damage in character sheet and theme advancement
Show damage formulas for many/most attacks
Vinewrench and Wild Grasp now pin the enemy
Insidious Filament is now passive, applies 2 poison to adjacent monsters
Increased range of Shackle interfusion recipe
Celestial Path no longer gives bonus to monsters
Riposte can now use theme arm attacks
Updated stat descriptions for consistency / clarity
Killing a boss with a reaction now grants victory immediately
Silkstep now shows as disabled if there are no valid destinations
Healing rate now has a min of 0.5 when not traveling
Spelltouched now gives -0.5 bonus damage
Improved feedback for soulsplitting
All hooks now have more appropriate combat maps
Mountain Mischief B and Great One have custom maps.
Skeleton stat changes should be permanent now
Tails (wolf and crow) are now granted automatically when you have a leg
Fixed bug where shred could be higher than armor
Fixed bug where some audio would still play when master volume was at 0
Fixed some bug with move-attack feedback
Fixed bug where compulsion didn't require line of sight
Fixed bug where hook quests involving retired heroes would stick around
Fixed rare cases where damage and shred could be fractional
Fixed: star dance would put the job on an unexplored tile
Fixed: attacking threats sometimes didn't show travel time
Fixed: attacking incursions used all heroes by default
Fixed several typos
Tools: implicit aspects (ALLY, etc..) can now be used in expressions
Tools: fixed bug where comic would crash if you deleted all panels
Tools: aspects and effects have a new "formula" field (will show in gray)
Tools: fixed bug where override name tags would get deleted
Tools: improved aspect search bar
Tools: improved alignment, selection and cursor behavior of text areas
Tools: Added RemoveGear outcome
Tools: added hints for all Outcomes.

This patch delivers several popular roadmap items. Firstly, children now track both parents, and family relationships are now preserved in the legacy. So families should make a lot more sense now.

Transformations (also called themes) can now be advanced during the interval, so you don't need to intentionally maim your hero if you want them to transform. This always felt bad and we're glad to finally be fixing it.

Also we now support a variety of facial hair, independent of hairstyle. The old hairstyles with beards baked in are no longer available for customization or generation, but old heroes with those styles will keep them.

We're hoping to stick to our two-week schedule, although this patch took an extra week due to having kids at home, etc.. Things might move a bit more slowly but we're still committed to our roadmap, which you can check out here.

Reworked Event: Waterling
Transformations (themes) can now advance during intervals!
You will get up to one choice per hero per interval, yes/no
Facial Hair is now separate from hair style!
Full beards work with male faces (must be drawn per-expression)
Several varieties generate and can be customized separately
Children now track both parents!
Parent-Child and Family relationships are now stored in the Legacy!
Family relationships are now noted in the Relationships tab
Defeating incursions now grants 2 legacy points
Remove attack-range calamities
Reduced combat text spam for corrupted ground, etc..
Themes are now better organized in the character sheet
Fixed a bug with Celestial theme
Fixed bug where mortificial wristbolt ignored Bowmaster
Fixed a bug where resource panels were not showing right number
Fix a rare crash bug with gear popup
Add an option to use local font sets or not (default not)
Fixed several typos
Tools: better language and translation mode options from the editor
Tools: Add cheats to manipulate family relationships
Tools: can bundle and unbundle non-comic effect text for translation


And If you're enjoying the game, please leave a review :-)

Wildermyth is, among other things, a game about storytelling. We want our players to be able to tell their own unique and unexpected stories through their heroes and their adventures. But in addition to that, we want modders to be able to tell their stories through custom campaigns and quests. As our comic and plot editors have grown, so has our excitement about getting our storytelling tools into the hands of players who want to tell stories. One of the main issues we've been facing so far is that our editors can be a little clunky. They can do a lot, but we're kind of half-documenting them as we go, and there can be a pretty steep learning curve.

In our latest patch, I took some time to add tooltips and descriptions to a lot of the campaign side of things to make it easier to understand the developer magic that makes our game tick. I also took a stab at making it easier for players who don't really care how the game ticks, but still want to tell stories.



This is the Create Campaign dialog! The basic idea is to have a simplified way to create all the parts of a basic story. There are some options for each chapter, but if you do nothing but open it up, name your scenario, choose a Main Enemy Type, and click Create, you'll have already created a full multi-chapter campaign with end-of-chapter missions. From there you can just go into the comic editor and do some artistic storytelling without ever touching the more complex plot creation tools.


You'll need:

• Wildermyth!

• Open the Editor from the main menu (Tools > Editor)
  
• Open the Content and Comics Editor. This is where most of the work on comics, events, and campaigns happens.
  
• Click the "Mods" button at the top-left, then click "Create New Mod". Create your mod, then click "Confirm".

As soon as you create your mod, you'll see the folder for it open in your file explorer. All the files for your mod should end up in this folder. When you're done creating your campaign or any other kind of mod, this is the folder that will be uploaded to Steam Workshop or elsewhere.

On the top left, switch from the "comics" tab to the "scenarios" tab. Click the "New Campaign" button, and you'll see the dialog shown above. Select your mod, give your campaign an id (for example, "myCoolCampaign", choose how many chapters you want it to be, the main enemy type, and the type of heroes to start with, and then make sure Auto-generate Chapter Sub-Plots is checked.

The right side is where you can define some of the specifics of your campaign. You can click Create without modifying any of this, but I'll go over the options in case you want to make something specific.

• Introduction Mission: Most campaigns start out with a mission that introduces the heroes and the threat. This will create that introductory mission, and promote your farmers to heroes if you started out with farmers. You can also make this and the Capstone Assault into custom missions, which there is more info on below. (Note: If you use a custom mission here, you'll need to add the promotion step yourself)
  
• Clear All Hostile Sites: For some chapters, you'll want the player to clear out the whole map before they can fight the final group of enemies. You can also choose to only require a certain enemy type to be cleared out (usually the main enemy type).
  
• Capstone Assault: Most of the time, you'll want a capstone assault mission for each chapter; the final battle before the chapter ends.
  
• Tiding: Sometimes, you might want to show a comic panel or two during the interval. This is something that happens during the "years of peace" between chapters.
  
• Omen: After chapter one, chapters should generally have an Omen comic that displays during the interval. This comic introduces the next chapter, i.e. why is the threat back? What are the hero goals?
  
• Custom Mission: This is a bit more complicated, so only do it if you're ready to get your feet wet with some other tools. If you want your intro or capstone missions to have custom maps, enemies, and goals, you can create a custom mission. Checking the "Custom Mission" box will show a Create button. Clicking the Create button will open up the New Fight dialog. This should already have the recommended ids and options selected, so just clicking Create is usually all you need to do to start.

The Id text field should automatically be filled with the id of the arrive event for the custom fight.



I'm not going to cover how to actually adjust the custom fight to your liking here, but you can read more about that in How To: Write your own Villain for Wildermyth - Part 2

You should now see your campaign show up in the Campaigns list. Neat! You'll want to select it, expand the scenarioInfo, and give it a name and a blurb (which start out as **myCoolCampaign.name and **myCoolCampaign.blurb). This is the title and description that players will see when they go to start a new game. Don't forget to save!



Great, now you have a working campaign! If you go back the the main menu and start a new game, you'll see the campaign you created show up in the list of choices. You can play through it and it should work, though all of the comics will just be placeholders.

Now that you've got your campaign up and running, all that's left is to add the story! Switch over to the comics tab, and you should see all the comic events that were just created for your campaign.


If you click through these, you'll see they're mostly empty panels or only have a single hero in them. I'm not going to go into detail about how to use the comic editor here, but most of the time, you'll be clicking New Story Role to add specific heroes to the comic, and then adding more comic panels, text, and images.

You can find some basics on the wiki in the Comic Editor Reference. You might also find How to: Add an Event to Wildermyth to be helpful.

And that's it! You've got yourself a basic campaign! If you want to do more complicated things, you'll need to do a bit more digging into the tools, but you can use this as a starting place.

If the Create Campaign tool didn't give you quite what you wanted, no worries, you can always dig in and change things to be the way you want afterward! Under the hood, the Create Campaign window does several things that can all be done individually:

• Creates a Campaign Scenario: This is used to start the campaign from the main menu, and is hooked up to a campaign Plot
  
• Creates Several Campaign Plots: These execute the logic of the campaign chapters, add objectives, control win and lose conditions, etc.
  
• Creates Events for Missions, Tidings, and Omens: You saw all these events in the image above. These events are triggered via the campaign Plots.

If you go over to the plots tab, you can see all the plots that were generated for your campaign. This includes one main plot, and a sub-plot for each chapter of your campaign. (If you chose to create custom missions, you'll also see plots for those missions, starting with "M_" for "Mission")

Click on the main campaign plot (without the number at the end) to take a look at it.


You can expand and look at each of the steps individually to get more details on how things are working. All objectives and steps have descriptions and tooltips, but here's an overview of each of the steps.

• StepC_MapConfig: Configures the overland map. Sets up where the capstone sites are, where enemies and towns are, and other related things. This is called at the start of a campaign.
  
• Step_SubPlot: There's one of these for each chapter, mostly for organizational and clarity reasons.
  
• StepC_DoInterval: In between each chapter is an interval. This is when the years of peace occur, heroes can upgrade gear, etc.
  
• StepC_Victory: Once all the chapters are completed, the player wins!

Each chapter sub-plot will look pretty similar, depending on what options you chose for each chapter when you created the campaign. They'll look something like this:


Again, these all have in-editor descriptions and tooltips, but here's an overview of the objectives and steps.

• Objective_CampaignDefeat: Causes a game over if there are ever no living heroes or no living towns
  
• Objective_CampaignUpkeep: Manages certain overland things that happen over time, like relationship points, burying dead heroes, and starting hook quests
  
• Objective_ClearAllHostileSites: Succeeds when all hostile sites have been cleared, optionally only requiring a specific flavor of enemy to be defeated or ignoring certain sites (usually the capstone site)
  
• Objective_LocateAndUnlockSite: Locks the capstone mission until ClearAllHostileSites is completed
  
• Objective_AssaultJob: Creates an assault job on a given site
  
• StepC_BeginChapter: Starts a campaign chapter. Clears any stored roles from the previous chapter, adds in any defined roles for this chapter
  
• Step_Encounter: Starts a mission immediately. This specific Encounter is used to start the introduction mission, since there isn't a site or job to assault like there is for most missions.
  
• Step_AddObjectives: Adds the given objectives to the plot via the plot's objectives list. This is how the objectives are started.

This is same plot system that all the existing villain campaigns use, so if you're trying to accomplish something that another campaign like Age of Ulstryx or Enduring War does, you can always enable that mod via the top-left Mods button, and then look at how those plots are set up for reference.

Happy storytelling!

We're hunkering down, sheltering-in-place, and fending off grouchy toddlers to bring you updates! We've got some new events, a bunch of tool improvement for starting your own campaigns and stories, and bug fixes/balance tweaks. Stay safe out there, heroes.

New Event: Lockwords
New Event: Answer to Austerity
New Mission Victory: Monstertalk
New Mission Victory: In the Dark Hours
New Mission Victory: Resistant
Add a random seed field to new game dialog that's used when generating map
Increase tier 3 one-handed axe shred to 2
Increase tier 2 and 3 two-handed axe shred to 2
Added shred to clockstopper
Bitter Scratch now a swift Action
Added confirm step to forget legacy hero, can now forget promoted heroes
Increased speed of XP and calamity card animations
Fixed several typos
Fixed a bug where skeleton could be selected for romance
Fixed a bug where monarchs ch2 recruit could be cancelled
Fixed a bug where you could pick the same legacy hero twice (crashed)
Tools: added many tooltips, especially for plots and scenarios
Tools: color coding for plot steps
Tools: New Campaign tool revamped, friendlier and more flexible
Tools: now possible to make mods that add hair, faces, heads
Tools: moved data out of humanSkin.json and into assets/data/peopleParts
Tools: improved order of entities when using inspect in comic tool
Tools: fixed a bug where scenario (e.g. roster) changes were not reloaded