Most items in the game will now have a monetary value, and can be sold to the Merchant if you ever feel like some of your items are no longer useful.
In order to summon the Merchant, you will need to build a new village improvement - Trading post.
The Merchant's inventory is still very modest, but they do sell two notable items - flower seeds and a sickle, providing a way to consistently farm herbs for making potions.
Gardening in Gelatine has a bit of action sprinkled on top. Launch a handful of seeds in the air and make sure they don't land on your head - that hurts!
Seeds that land on grass will grow instantly - there's no downtime before harvesting your herbs. You can then use the sickle to efficiently harvest all plants.
P.S.: The number of accessory slots has been reduced from 7 to 5.
I wasn't too sure about this change, but seven slots felt like way too much, considering that a lot of things that could have been an accessory are instead learned in the skill tree.
Any accessories that may have been equipped in 6th and 7th slot will be automatically unequipped and placed in your inventory.
Fixing Alchemist-related bugs and Slime spear exploit
Fixed an issue that was causing the bottled elemental to attack the alchemist NPC. To be fair, that behavior was understandable - who do you think put the elemental in the bottle in the first place?
Fixed an issue that prevented the herb grinder from being harvestable.
Equipping the Automatic targeting system along with Spectral spearhead will no longer result in projectiles endlessly chasing enemies and trivializing all content. The projectile will now only track enemies until it deals damage to the first enemy, and will just keep flying in a straight line after that.
Alchemy!
To get started with alchemy, you'll first need to build the Alchemy table that summons the alchemist NPC:
Before herbs can be used in potion-making, they need to be ground up into a herb mix using a herb grinder, crafted by the alchemist using a small amount of wood.
Grinding herbs is a tedious process that involves manually turning the handle. If only we had the technology to automate this process...
In fact, we can! After defeating the Metal Core, you can use one of its energy cores to power the electric herb grinder.
You can then use the herb mix to craft some potions! Four potions are currently in the game, with more to be added in future updates.
Healing potion instantly hestores 40 health
Mana potion grants you 3 mana points
Potion of momentum gives you a significant speed boost for 7 seconds
Potion of divine protection makes you immune to all damage for 3 seconds
All potions share the same 1-minute cooldown, so you'll have to choose the right potion depending on circumstances!
Other
Now that alchemy is in the game, the "Heal" ability has been nerfed from 12 health per second to 8 health per second, and has been moved slightly further down the skill tree (so that it's no longer a requirement for learning the dash skill).
All item tooltips are now showing the item type
Slightly tweaked item rarity colors
Mini-update: questing improvements and shotgun boots
Slightly improved questing experience
Removed some particularly boring quests
Added a couple of new quests, arguably more interesting than the old ones
The quests are now more obviously categorized into main quests (i.e. boss fights) and side quests
New equipment item: Shotgun boots
Crafted by the Engineer
Requires Mysterious energy cores to craft, a material that drops from Metal Core
Other
You can now jump even when the character is slightly above the ground, which makes timing your jumps a bit easier and removes the frustration of your character not jumping when you hit spacebar a couple milliseconds too early.
Fixed the issue that prevented the character from jumping when moving up or down a "staircase" of blocks.
Fixed the issue where the character was not taking damage from being inside the map border, which allowed the player to use the teleportation ability to venture outside of the game world.
Balanced the volume of the cave background music, the later section of the track should no longer be ear-piercingly loud.
New boss - The Decomposer
The Decomposer
The summon item for the new boss can be obtained in two ways: either by killing the Metal Core boss, or asking your local engineer to craft the Personal threat analyzer for 1 Mysterious energy core (a crafting material that also drops from Metal Core)
New items
The Decomposer drops a new type of material - Advanced AI modules - that will be used to craft AI-themed stuff moving forward
New accessory: Automatic targeting system. Makes your slime spears automatically target nearby enemies, but deal 10% less damage. Craftable using AI modules.
New object: Automatic sliding door. Opens and closes automatically based on proximity to the player. Craftable using AI modules.
Other
The amount of loot from bosses now depends on the difficulty. Higher difficulty == more loot.
"Heal" ability has been greatly buffed; it now restores 12 health per second, up from 5. Will probably get nerfed again after I add alchemy to the game, which will bring more ways to restore health.
Pocket singularities (aka black holes) can now be crafted by the Engineer for 1 Mysterious energy core.
Hot-swappable tiles and other quality-of-life improvements
Replaceable tiles
You can now replace tiles by placing a new tile directly on top of the old one, making it more convenient to build creative designs and change them on-the-fly
Works both with foreground blocks and background walls
List of learned active abilities
As the talent tree grows in size, it will get more and more inconvenient to look through the entire tree in search for active abilities that you want to put on the hotbar
For that reason, there is now a list of all available skills, conveniently placed on the talent tree screen
Other
Wooden planks can now be crafted by default, without the help of an NPC, to give slightly more variety of initially available materials
Damage numbers will now appear near enemies each time they take damage
Added sound and visual effects of picking up an item from an inventory slot and placing an item into an inventory slot
Healing ability, rebindable hotbar slots, black hole nerf
New learnable ability: Heal
Hold the left mouse button to slowly restore health, at a rate of 5 HP per second
Available at the very beginning of the skill tree
Black hole rework
This was way too powerful to be a permanent ability, so it was removed from the skill tree and turned into a rare, single-use item
This item drops from Metal Core boss in small quantities
Fixed an issue that was causing the black hole to reward the player with massive amounts of XP for "mining" tiles that are already empty
Flamethrower changes
Flamethrower's secondary ability is now a talent that has to be learned.
This is to ease the learning curve and not overwhelm the player with an extra long description of a single ability.
UI
Key bindings can now be changed for most actions, including the action bar slots, and key binding settings are now properly saved
Nodes in the talent tree are now much smaller and closer to each other, making the whole thing easier to read. Currently the whole skill tree fits on the screen without needing to scroll.
Other
Fixed a rare crash related to the frozen orb trying to target enemies that are already dead
New abilities & UI improvements
The development is going a bit slower than I'd hoped due to very lengthy power outages caused by the destroyed power infrastructure :(
The next few weekly patches will probably be relatively minor until the situation improves.
New movement ability: Tornado smash
Press S while in mid-air to quickly plummet to the ground
This, along with the double jump talent, allows finer control over your vertical movement
Landing on an enemy will deal damage to them and cause your character to bounce off the target
Note: Since the "S" key is now used for this new ability, it can no longer be used to dash; use Shift instead.
Slime spear upgrade: Frozen orb
Launches a slow-moving orb that doesn't do anything, but can be hit with a slime spear
Hitting the orb with a slime spear will cause it to shatter into ice shards that automatically target nearby enemies
UI improvements
Action bars are now vertically stacked on top of each other, and (subjectively) look better and are easier to see
Inventory slots are now colored based on the rarity of the item in that slot, clearly showing which items in your inventory are more interesting and valuable
A confirmation dialog will now appear before starting a village-upgrading invasion, to prevent doing so accidentally
Engine
Very slightly optimized dynamic world loading, which leads to a small performance boost, especially on lower end PCs
Slime whip changes
Added a more satisfying effect of hitting an enemy with the whip, so that it no longer feels like a wet noodle
Questing
Removed the "Kill 25 enemies" quest as it's kinda boring and serves no purpose
Hotfix for performance issues
Fixing some things that I forgot to do before pushing the patch live.
- Turned multithreading back on (It was turned off for debug purposes, causing the FPS to absolutely tank)
- Slightly modified the talent tree, reducing the number of initial options to just three (Way too many options were being offered right from the start, which is likely to confuse new players)
- Fixed a dungeon-related issue where the small area in the lower-right corner of the room was not being loaded
Elemental mini-dungeon
A short video demonstrating the new stuff:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IK23QLiGe7s
Full change log:
New content: elemental mini-dungeon
A tiny dungeon culminating in a Frostfire Pineapple mini-boss
You can find the dungeon entrance in the snow biome, in a large castle-like structure (existing worlds should already have it, no need to create a new world)
At the start of the dungeon, you will select one negative effect that will make the dungeon harder.
The reward at the end of the dungeon will depend on the chosen negative effect.
Added an achievement for defeating the dungeon boss