Here at Crate, we put patches in your patches. While v1.1.9.6 is already in development, we’re way too excited to share news on v4.1.2.2, with exciting overhauls to many game systems and mechanics.
But that’s not all, as today we’re proud to announce our first foray into physical merch!



Learn more on the forum!

Happy to announce our latest graphics patch featuring pixel art support.

We accidentally made it irreversible tho. Sorry.



Have fun ːlunar2020confidentroosterː

Greetings, Rooster Aficionados!

This week's update has been released, Probably going to use this time of day for future updates.

This update features big changes in the jumping physics and some slight changes to the movement speed, attack speed and the amount of damage received and taken for each character, to spice up the gameplay.

The update also comes with some bug fixes as usual and finally, working achievements, with plans to add more achievements on future updates.

The developers learned about a beautiful thing called "Gravity"
The Jumping and Falling Physics have changed with this update! Now the characters fall faster due to the increased gravity and increased the jumping force and the amount of impulse the "Spring Mushrooms" give to compensate this change.

"pls nerf Ebola" -Everyone
This update is the first to introduce slight stat variations to the playable characters, that will be balanced for future updates based on player feedback. These variations mainly affect the movement and attack speed, the amount of damage the characters cause and receive and some other things, below is a brief description of the overall changes:

Jake McChicken will have slower movement and attack speed than the other characters but his attacks hit harder and has a slight damage resistance.

Ebola Coli is the fastest and most agile character of the bunch, she moves faster and has the highest attack speed but does less damage and receives more damage from attacks.

Cuurian is the "Balanced" character, does less damage than Jake but higher than Ebola, and her speed is in between the two mentioned characters too.

Congratulations, only took you two months!
Achievements are now actually unlockable, there are two easy to get achievements with more to come on the next updates.

Extra Stuff
Fixed a bug that caused the online mode to spawn an invisible "out of bounds area" in middle of the playfield that broke a lot of maps.

Added a "Cinnamon Bun" Object to the map editor.

The "Fixes" Folder in the game's install directory is back, for the people getting hangs at startup due to their graphics card, there is a reg file there that could help fix the problem.

As always, Have fun and see you in the streets of New Sun City!

[Dev] Cuurian - Lobosandia

In the lands of Calderia, you cannot build your realm with your bare hands. You will need people to master the art of building and infrastructure. That's why we introduce you to this new set of companions.

What is a companion?

Companions are units used in social conflicts, much like soldiers are used in battles. They also give players a glimpse of the culture and everyday life of Calderia. Their appearances are based on Renaissance clothes mixed with classical antiquity and a splash of fantasy elements.

This new set of companions will help you build your realm.

• Architect
  Any major constructions or public buildings need an Architect. Their designs are based on the guidelines of the Old Continent, with inspirations drawn from the architectural marvels of Calderia.
  
  
• Master Builder
  A building made by a Master Builder can stand for centuries and still look like it was built yesterday. Master Builders oversee everything from soil to the quality of building materials to the construction of treadwheel cranes.
  
  
• Cartographer
  There are two places one can find a Cartographer from. Either at their desk drawing maps with meticulous precision, or climbing a high vantage point somewhere in the wilderness, carrying along with their various measuring instruments.

See these elements in preview in our Discord! Join us there to chat with the team and get involved in the development of Great Houses of Calderia: https://discord.gg/vsxD6n8P8J

- Great Houses of Calderia Team -

We are proud to announce subROV: Jurassic Edition!



subROV: JE is a upcoming expansion for subROV that allows you to travel back in time and explore the depths of Panthalassa, brimming with new dives, creatures, and all sorts of wonders for you to discover!

Remember to visit us on Discord and stay tuned for more updates.

Thank you!










(and Happy April fools day!) ːsteamhappyː

Happy Friday, peeps! We've stopped doing our fortnightly sprint updates (please tell us in the comments if you'd like us to start doing them again), but we have lots of irons in the fire and I thought it's high time for me to give you an update. So here's what's coming up in the next chapter of Weather Factory: Still Not Doing the Visual Novel We Made Up In 2018.



TLDR: prototype in May!

To be totally honest - we usually pride ourselves on being good at production and hitting deadlines - our plans went rather sideways on this one. We've had some problems as a studio over the last few years, and dealing with them meant AK almost burned out, couldn't work as usual, and I had to come up with projects I could do primarily on my own in lieu of making our lovely library game about peace, melancholy and satisfaction on the top of a rock in pseudo-Wales. But we really are still making this game (!) and by the end of May we expect to hit prototype, showcasing the central game loop. Huzzah!



We'll be inviting a small number of people to test the game then, so {LINK REMOVED}make sure you're signed up to the mailing list if you'd like to see an early first pass of the game.

In the meantime, have a look at what we've been up to! Starting with UI, which we're trying to base as much on Cultist Sim as possible but updated with hard-won experience and, frankly, a leather grimoire-y vibe. Here's what we're working with so far in your main Librarian window:






Familiar but different, right? But unlike Cultist's approach - where the UI is the same whether you're taking a tincture of opium with the Dream verb or sending a Hint to murder Connie Lee - BOOK OF HOURS needs a bunch of complementary but different UI for different moments in the game. Cultist's square verb tiles, for example, will be replaced in favour of real-world interactable locations like desks, gardens and ovens. Clicking on these open different recipe windows where your items and intangibles can be used, and where you can (possibly? probably?) store items. So you'll click on your librarian's desk to open the 'Library Desk' window, for example, and it'll reflect that it's a different interactive point in the game with slightly different UI. Here's what we're trying right now:





You might remember that BOOK OF HOURS is a melancholy, lonely game about managing a crumbling antique library of esoteric books and we want it to feel like a hygge, isolated escape from the world, where you can curl up with your cat and some marginalia while the rain gently patters the lead-glass of your study window. One of the best ways to evince a feeling like this is to occasionally - OCCASIONALLY - have someone visit you to pierce that loneliness, and make you feel it all the more when they depart. Sometimes they'll be friendly. Sometimes they might not. And those pesky Suppression Bureau agents have frankly nothing better to do, and like the way you make tea. So we need a basic UI dedicated to talking to these visitors, every now and then.



Overall, we're working on the assumption that the zoomed-out view of BOOK OF HOURS will look something like the below. NOT the art, which is a super super early mock-up I made in 2019, but a pulled-back simulator view of the whole of Hush House that lets you see an overview of everything going on in your game, and a vaguely mechanically appropriate UI, essentially giving you a quickbar for commonly-used cards and access to a much larger menu of items, skills, attributes, etc. You'll be able to zoom in to see detail and do small, specific tasks like personally ordering your books on your bookshelf. (Please note, if AK sees anyone ordering their books by colour he is likely to cry EHEU and delete all the code).



To make the prototype look even slightly like the final game, I've been mocking up some very basic assets to indicate relative sizes so we can answer questions like how high the ceilings shoul dbe, how many books you can put in a bookshelf, and whether we want a cosy librarian's nook or an intimidating Smaug's lair of occult grimoires. This is all TBD, and the art style will almost certainly change. But for now pls enjoy tiny Fuchsia's head on a 1930s outfit inspired by President Zelensky's war-jumper. Because why not.



I'm very keen on being able to customise characters, and have plans - but AK is sensibly undecided on this for now and gets the final say. MORE ON THIS LATER WHEN WE KNOW OURSELVES.

TLDR: monthly release of limited edition box, £100 + shipping, coming in May

Speaking of letters... I'm back on my boxy bullshit!  I'm releasing 25 special, limited edition library-focused boxes each month from May to August to mark That Damned Library Game's prototype, sold via our Etsy shop. You might have seen this photo from our last newsletter:



This is the prototype for May's box, from the desk of the librarian of the Grove of Green Immortals, the mountain-monastery of renegade Taoists specialising in horticulture and medicine, in Moth and Heart lore, under the hand of the Applebright. We're working with a totally brilliant artisan who's hand-carving each box, which will then contain something like the following:



There are inks in which histories are written, and inks which protect against untruth. There are inks which can only be read by night, and inks binding the author to the one whose name is written. And then there are inks of which the Hours take note - and inks that are forbidden. So every box will contain a highly restricted sample of six: uzult, porphyrine, nillycant, perinculate, marakat and the Orpiment Exultant (mixed by the fair hand of your resident apothecary, me).  [As WFCAT aficionados will know, one of these things is not like the others. - AK] They'll look a bit like the Cultist Simulator launch present I made AK, which lots of people kindly asked if they could buy but I can't make it work as a product:



Each box will also contain a unique collection of visitors, calling cards from notable guardians of the library, a library membership card, genuine 1900s-1930s sealing wax and ephemera and a couple of letters, among other things. Each box has a particular affiliation with a guest, who'll appear in every copy of that box. In the Grove's case, it's Zulfiya the Barber. You might be able to guess the two of the three other libraries from their main guest, perhaps...?



And some of these guardians you've heard of. Any idea who these cards are from? (In reality, each of these will be gold-foiled - so imagine them being shiny and impressive.)



We'll announce each box at the end of the month when it goes on sale on Etsy, along with a design update on BOOK OF HOURS from AK.

I can already hear some of you thinking: twenty-five? Only twenty-five boxes? These people are MORONS they will CLEARLY SELL OUT IMMEDIATELY! And you're sort of not wrong. AK and I are a two-person team doing almost everything ourselves, and I nearly lost my marbles assembling, packing and sending 500 Lady Afterwards boxes earlier this year. So I'm trying to balance making fun, unique real-life items you can't get anywhere else (like these Secret Historian boxes) with not going totally batshit managing a production line I can't sustain. 25 boxes a month won't make me want to throw myself into the Thames. This is good.

Against that, I do appreciate our volume limitations make it annoying for someone who logs in five minutes later than planned and finds all the boxes they'd been excited to buy have been bought. So if that's you, fear not. Once we've released all four limited edition Secret Historian boxes - which we'll advertise ahead of time, so you know exactly when they're coming - we'll then sell an unlimited Hush House edition, sold in batches so I don't go nuts. This'll make sure everyone who wants a box gets one.

Anyway, back to the fun stuff. Here's the first batch of letters I received from our printer this morning:



You've seen these letters before, though not with their nice updated designs. But there's one that's totally new... What do you lore-hounds make of this?



Read-friendly text version here.

TLDR: lots of it

Read our latest blog for more news on Cultist Simulator, our Secret Histories TRPG The Lady Afterwards, and our upcoming series of live events, The Locksmith's Dream. More updates for BOOK OF HOURS coming soon!

Fixed saving some of the parameters when exiting the battle
Fixed cropped items list
Fixed research selection thorough other menus
Fixed bug with removing green mech from components order

Decreased drone repair efficiency
Reduced the time and number of slots for the production of the first mech. Added reduction as district upgrade.
Increased research time for mechs.
Improved battle stats display
Added different monitor aspect ratio support. (I hope it's working)
Removed spawners in empty rooms of labyrinth
Increased heat from using electronic circuits
Increased radius for completing/escaping mission
Added damage display when hovering mouse over mechs in battle pause
Added ability to select mechs by clicking on them on the combat map
Added Monster artillery (landing)
Added auto ammo reload system for mechs
Added support ropes for hauling slowed mechs by others
Mechs now stand still at the beginning of the mission
Added automatic speed synchronization for accelerated time
Changed how the special weapon modifier works. Instead of armor penetration and dispersion, now applies armor penetration and acceleration.
Added corrections in the intro (rus and eng)
Added minor adjustments in the phrases of the pilots
Reduced the number of monsters in the beginning
Added button for automatic repair (only for simple repair)
Increased heat from reloading
Reduced the firing range of enemy turrets
Increased the rate of fire of enemy turrets
Improved the AI ​​of rammers. Now they take longer to aim at the target.
Added destruction stages for spawners
Added display of statistics of the average distance to the enemy in the results
Added global statistics in the winning screen


Also, the demo was updated to the current version. (without main objective and special maps)

Next update is delayed.
I don't know for how long.

Thank you for playing the game and your feedback.

- Fixed broken reference images in plain palettes (ColorGraph palettes were unaffacted)
- Fixed "Import Colors" freezing the program in some cases
- Reference images now properly save the position and size of their window as was intended

Material settings (color, metallic, smoothness) have been added to glass and stone modulars. The transparency of glass modulars can be adjusted as well.

• Placed air vehicles in the editor will now be placed depending on the terrain height below them (or the height of the closest terrain edge if placed outside of the terrain)
  
• Modern and future era planes and helicopters now have flares to defend from anti air missles. The amount of available flares depend on the air vehicle and every time flares are used, there is a 90% chance that the missle targets one of the flares instead
  
• Added the LH100 bomber (fictional) which is similar to real life stealth planes
  
• Helicopter improvements
  
  • Added inertia to helicopter movement
    
  • They will now look ahead when calculating their target height to prevent crashes
    
  • Height calculations will now consider modular buildings and other objects
    
  • Before crashing into a building, helicopters will try to stop and move up now
    
  • Helicopters will no longer try to shoot through the terrain and objects (if there is no chance that the target can be hit)
    
  • Improved destruction: Helicopters will start to smoke and fall down with their current velocity and random rotation, once they hit the ground they will explode
• Plane improvements
  
  • Plane movement is no longer physics based to make it more predictable and reliable
    
  • Planes will look ahead (similar to helicopters) to calculate and keep a safe flight height
    
  • Their targeting has been improved slightly and ground only targeting should work again
    
  • Improved plane/plane avoidance in the air
    
  • Dropped bombs will now have inertia. As a result, planes will drop their bombs much earlier to hit their target
    
  • Instead of just breaking apart when being destroyed, planes will now start to smoke and fall to the ground similar to helicopters

• Added OnUnitStart event node which runs for each placed/spawned unit
  
• Added nodes to get information about an equipment id: GetDamage, GetCaliber, GetMagazineCapacity, GetArmorClass
  
• Added OnBeginReload and OnReload event nodes which will run when the player starts to reload and when the reloading process has just finished

• Updated the pause menu
  
• Added a volume adjust slider to the pause menu, which can be used to quickly adjust the volume while playing a map from the workshop.
  
• Modular pillars can now be dragged upwards to place multiple at once

• Fixed that punching with ranged weapons would trigger the OnShoot event node
  
• Fixed generation of destroyed vehicle variants in the editor
  
• Fixed that png files with uppercase extension (.PNG) could not be loaded
  
• Fixed that searching with uppercase text for units in transport vehicles would not find any
  
• Fixed that the fog edit button would be hidden in the fog for high fog intensity
  
• Fixed that custom poisoned zombies did not cause poison damage
  
• Fixed that fog would become invisible when returning from the custom unit editor
  
• Fixed various errors related to zombie grenades
  
• Fixed incorrect aim point positioning and weapon accuracy when using scripting walls which only block the player
  
• Fixed a bug that caused the max health of the player to be set to the amount of the previous campaign level
  
• Fixed a bug that caused the plant in plant pots to stay in place when the pot dropped
  
• Fixed various issues that caused wall mounted objects to fall to the ground when deleting any object with a relation to it
  
• Fixed that open doors would break as if they were closed
  
• Fixed plane settings UI errors
  
• Fixed that editing modular colors would result in slight rgb value differences when selecting the same object again
  
• Fixed a bug that allowed objects to be deselected while using transform handles

The custom creators are still being worked on. The first private beta test is next week to test the functionality of the editors. If everything works well, I'm going to start implementing the custom items in the save system and other parts of the game, which will bring it much closer to release.
If you want to see the creators in action, here is a video about them:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-pkkQwlfIc

Happy Friday, peeps! We've stopped doing our fortnightly sprint updates (please tell us in the comments if you'd like us to start doing them again), but we have lots of irons in the fire and I thought it's high time for me to give you an update. So here's what's coming up in the next chapter of Weather Factory: Still Not Doing the Visual Novel We Made Up In 2018.



TLDR: it bork, we soz

As you may have seen, AK revamped the entire Cultist Simulator code base (to make it more stable, and to prep for BOOK OF HOURS), nearly had a nervous breakdown because coding is not what he likes best, released what we professionals call a 'buggy AF' update in March, and has since pushed a patch a week to put the fires out. [Now I'm doing a patch a week. In the first two weeks I pushed a patch a day. - AK] All while also developing a second game on top and agonising which doublet to wear in Witcher 3.

His latest update was Tuesday: read for experimental multi-select and snippet-saving! He's now working on improvements to the new card placement system, which has a few weirdnesses and bugs, and is by far the most annoying thing still going wrong in the live game. We'll update ASAP when that's ready to go out.


Maybe we should implement a 'Chaos' slider that places cards ANYWHERE THE GAME GODDAMN WANTS

This is more BOOK OF HOURS-y, really, but as an apology for the trouble, have some lore in the shape of a letter from the mysterious Daymare to a lady named Gwen...


Text-only read-friendly version here!

TLDR: boxed edition for sale from 31st May

I took on too much assembling and shipping 500 Lady Afterwards boxes on my own. But lots of people still want one, I'm delighted to say. How to square this circle? BY MAKING YER MUM DO IT FOR YOU! (But, paying her a decent wage to do so, so she can buy tulip bulbs and wine, her two major expenses.)

So we're releasing another 1,000 Lady Afterwards: Boxed Edition boxes for sale on Tuesday 31st May 2022 on our Etsy shop. Like we did with the original runs of the Tarot of the Hours, we'll release these boxes in tranches of 50-100 so my mother doesn't totally lose the plot. This means if you go to our shop and don't see any boxes available, don't worry! We'll restock every week - if you miss out one time, there'll be another batch of boxes available very soon. Hopefully this'll allow our teeny studio to provide boxes for everyone who wants one, without us having to stop doing all the other work we're doing on actual games and becoming a physical-first TRPG store. Woot.



TLDR: lots of it

Read our latest blog for more news on our next game set in Cultist Simulator's universe, BOOK OF HOURS, and our upcoming series of live events set in the Secret Histories, The Locksmith's Dream. Or sit back and wait for card placement fixes. Enjoy your weekends!