Dredgers cover
Dredgers screenshot
Genre: Role-playing (RPG), Indie

Dredgers

Dredgers on Sale!

Since I've been able to update the game, decided to put up a new sale for those who missed out on the summer sale!
So Dredgers is on sale this week for those who are on the fence about trying out the game!
There's been a large update a few days ago with a lot of fun stuff to try out, so check it out here! :D

Version 48: Mechanist

Greeting Dredgers!


Version 48 is finally here in full force, the highlight of this patch is the Mechanist class, allowing you to craft new limbs and place or even replace your own body parts, along with adding more with the new harness item! This system required a rework of how limbs in the game work, and so most races have had tweaks to their body slots. Wroughts, EMPU and Domples in particular got the most work.
This patch is a big mix up of a lot of small changes I've been adding over the last two years, along with some bigger additions.

Mechanist



Our first new class in a while. With the new limb system there had to be a class to interact with it. Mechanists effectively let you customise what equip slots you want, and can effectively give you two extra slots if you're willing to forgo armour.

Limb Rework



Limbs, aka equip slots, have been rework, giving me a lot more flexibility in how they work. The main change here for players is that Left and Right mouse buttons no longer correspond to specific arms, Left Click is now always attack for both arms, prioritising the arm on the left side. Right click is now only used for swapping Book spells, but also may be used for shields and such in the future. Additionally, races that can wear shoes now have TWO feet slots, rather than one. Shoe stats were nerfed by half obviously. Finally, wearing a mask lets you wear a hat on top of it, a personal wish of mine for about 3 years.

  • Visic can no longer wear Helmets or Masks.
  • Seemujh now only have 1 extra casting slot and can no longer wear Helmets.
  • Bloodfallen can no longer use their Antlers to cast.
  • Crabmen now have a dedicated Mask slot.
  • Sychian can no longer wear headgear, but can wear Charms on their head.
  • Roundtoothed and Leiches can only equip Hats and Charms on their heads now.


The Wrought



Wroughts got a skill rework as I didn't like how they felt to play, nor did they feel scary enough as enemies. Their old Metal Taste has now been combined into Iron Wreath, which is also itself now a targeted ability. To fill the empty slot they get "Lightless Journey", allowing them to vanish, moving quickly in light and re-appearing in shadow. They also now have a third leg slot for lore accuracy.

E.M.P.U



EMPU have been given 4 'foot' slots, for lore accuracy. However these foot slots are actually wheels! They give a speed boost when empty, or a speed penalty when a shoe is worn. Additionally you can get wheels as other races using the hunter skill 'Collect Trophy' on EMPU.

Domples


Mostly minor changes for the lovable fuzzballs, putting points into CON now puts points into STR as well, instead of the strange conversion thing. INT is still lowered by STR. Additionally, Domples can no longer suffer from the overweight debuff.

Flooded Floors




Changelog:



  • Game now supports German!
  • Boss HP bar rewritten so seeing armour is easier.
  • Bosses now have a fancy animation on starting.
  • You now need a gold key to leave on the King's Banquet floor.
  • SPD and STR can no longer lower punch damage when at negative values.
  • Targets can only drop blue EXP once ever, even if raised as undead.
  • Corpses now heal very quickly if they are satiated.
  • Enemies can no longer use corpse explosion on you if you are an animated corpse.
  • Raising a corpse levels them up according to your INT, capped by your Level.
  • Ranged Enemies should be more consistent in understand line of sight.
  • Enemies now only use dodge roll after being hit.
  • Pause now only unpauses when pressing bound keys, and won't unpause while unfocused.
  • Projectiles are now deleted when they leave off-screen instead of freezing in time.
  • Thrown weapons with ENG scalings now actually spend energy.
  • Anything immune to lava can now path through lava, primarily Magnites and Animated items.
  • Floors are now one room shorter, aside from Castle, Labs and Forge areas, which are one room longer.
  • Enemies that notice you will signal to other enemies that you are there.
  • Higher tier enemies have more consistent levels.
  • Higher tier enemies have big skulls above their heads so people realise how dangerous they are.
  • There's a new combat music system that is off by default, it currently only really changes things in the Caverns.
  • The sound system has been rewritten, so ambient sounds should be more audible in quiet moments.
  • 'Guilded' now only works with living or animated allies.
  • Arrow hitbox increased.
  • You no longer get items automatically from destroying furniture if auto-pickup is off.
  • Gardule can now throw items and only picks them up instantly afterwards.
  • When you are paid 1000+ coins, it upgrades the tier of coin you're being paid.
  • Teleport slow down has been reduced.
  • Energy when resting is 100x faster instead of 10x faster.
  • All races can now rest, but only get some of the benefits, such as armour refilling faster.
  • You can now buyback sold items from the peddler.
  • Summoning Circles now generate flux.
  • Anything made of energy is now forbidden from taking summoner due to health costs.
  • Improved Ghost visuals.
  • Ghost orb nerf, they can only have 2 orbs at once, and spend energy to make orbs, which deal INT damage.
  • Ghost 'Boo' nerf, has a 5 second cooldown.
  • When corpses are destroyed, they turn into skeletons now.
  • Turning into a skeleton un-animates the corpse if it was animated.
  • Rats, Crabs and critters in general no longer try to walk directly on you.
  • Sinking into the ground either by standing in water or using a racial skill dims held lights.
  • Flux has new visuals.
  • Ghost Blade has been renamed to Soul Blade and now has a special prefix that allows it to be held by ghosts. This was always possible but it's clearer now. Ironically, Ghosts have 0 STR and cannot use Soul Blade.
  • Two-Handed weapons now put both hands on cooldown when thrown.
  • There's now an ember prefix, this is applied when weapons like clubs and quarter staffs touch flames. It eventually lights the weapon on fire, but this should help against enemies just suddenly getting flaming equipment.
  • Magnites can now reflect projectiles with their Heat Wave.
  • Merchants that sell shoes sell a pair of them, and you pay once to buy the pair.
  • Priest boss will now dodge shield toss.
  • Books now have a casting animation, preventing it from working with other attack animations.



And that's the version for today!
Thanks for your patience, and reading all the way through, I hope you have as much fun with this version as I have had!

Version 48 Beta: Now available for testing!

It's been too long, but Greetings Dredgers!
I've finally had some time to work on Dredgers after about, 2.5 years, sorry for the wait :(

I plan to release this patch properly soon, but I need some help testing it, so jump on the buggy branch and give it a whirl!
The password is IDoNotCareAboutBugs



Limbs


The limb system has been totally rewrite, this does come with some changes for players:
You no longer need to press both right and left click to use both weapons, you can just press left click now.
Books now use right click to swap spell.
There are now two shoe slots instead of one, double the shoes!
About half the races got small or minor changes to their limb slots and what they can equip, so make sure to read before reporting bugs regarding this.

Wroughts


Two of the wrought passives, (Iron Wreath and Metal Taste) are now a single usable skill that marks an enemy with Iron Wreath, but otherwise works mostly the same as before.
Wroughts now have an ability that allows them to vanish to the in-between, popping up in dark areas.
Beware, enemy Wroughts will use this as well.

Mechanist


There's now a new crafting-based class called Mechanist! You can find it in the craftsman tree.
This new class allows you to interact with the limb system in very interesting ways. You can replace limbs and put on a harness to gain more slots! I can't wait to see what broken things players come up with with these mechanics!



This patch has a BUNCH of changes from months of on and off work, and I'll be writing the full changelog when it fully releases.
Now, I am sorry to disappoint, the new boss will not be available this patch. I had time and I decided it'd be better to try get the patch out sooner rather than later by constantly working on the boss.
I'll hopefully get the patch out onto the stable/normal branch in a few weeks.
Thank you so much for your patience, it's been such a joy to have a chance to work on Dredgers again, I've really missed it.
Thanks for reading, see ya next time!

Version 47 Hotfix

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

EXP


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!

Archery


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.

Weapon Speed


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


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).

Changelog:


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

Version 47: Crafting Prefixes and Balance

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 Prefixes



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.

Balance


Everyone's favourite word!

EXP


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.

Prefixes


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 Merchant


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.

QoL



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

Changelog:


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!

Version 46: Save Games and Translation

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.

Saving


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.

Translation


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\\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!

Changelog:


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!